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THE FLURRIED YEARS

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The Flurried Years

:: :: By Violet Hunt :: ::

WITH ifl ILLUSTRATIONS

HURST & BLACKETT, LTD.
PATERNOSTER HOUSE, E.C.

PR

GO 1 5

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Made and Printed in Great Britain by

The Cameloi Press Limited,

Southampton

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

FRONTISPIECE

Facing Pagt

JOSEPH CONRAD AND HIS PROOF-SHEET

• 32

MARY MARTINDALE

• 50

JOSEPH LEOPOLD

. 62

MY NIECE

. 66

HENRY JAMES

. 88

MY MOTHER

. 112

AUNT EMMA'S HOUSE AT BOPPARD

. 126

DAVID GARNETT AND JOSEPH LEOPOLD AT ASSMANS-

HAUSEN

• 132

GONERIL IN BED

. 152

MY SISTER

. 208

MISS REBECCA WEST AT HOME

. 214

OUR COTTAGE AT SELSEY ....

. 218

THE GOOD SOLDIER

. 260

WILLIAM HENRY HUDSON ....

. 268

PART I

THE FLURRIED YEARS

1908

The Great Affair of All — "One word is too often profaned " — Oliver

Madox Brown and Joseph Conrad on Passion — Oscar before America —
" Hie sunt leones " — / go there — The New Argonauts — W. L. George
on Genius — W. B. Yeats on the stoking of it — Mr. Chandler an important
person — Mrs. Chandler ditto — Hermosa — The Impropriety of Thomas
Hardy — Editors and Backers — The Pinker of Agents — With the Monds
at Joyous Gard — Mr. Carlyon Bellairs and the British Navy — The
German Professor — The Soul's Wireless — Conrad on Prestidiginous
People — Perceval Gibbon — Arthur Marwood — Payment of Contribu-
tors— Arnold Bennett — Cunninghame Graham — W. H. Hudson and the
Cuckoo — His ideal Woman — The Association of Conrad and the Editor —
Damon and Pythias — Agonies of Composition — The Pent Farm —
S. S. McClure and Miss Willa Gather — Henry James as " Modeste
Mignon " — H. G. and the Editor's Mead — Suffragettes at Mrs. Godfrey
Benson's — Mr. Asquilh and the Dinner Napkin — Christmas Party
at 84 — The launch of the " English Review."

Life is a succession of affairs, but there is always one
affair for which the years, from birth, are a preparation,
a hardening, a tempering, and a more or less serious
erosion, possibly, of the sword of the fighter. And there
comes, sooner or later, according to the sets and the
entries and exits of the other actors, one's own supreme
moment. One is on. And that entry, being but human,
one may so easily muff. That moment, some will say,
I did muff.

Not, said a soldier to me, walking along the pier at
Redcar in the days of the bitterness of the war — when
words flowed from the mouths of deeply tried men,
ebullitions of a deep and desperate cynicism that seemed
to sour the sunlight — not, said he, till a person comes to
lie on his deathbed and is faced with that five minutes'

io The Flurried Years

unrolling of the Book of Judgment — that feverish access
of memory, including full clarity of vision, of which all
who have been brought back from the gates of death
have spoken and written — does a person know which is
the affair of all. And not even then, perhaps, with which
of the three prime passions that moment would come
to be concerned — affair of the heart ? — affair of ambi-
tion ? — affair of revenge ? — these simple emotions that
sway us indifferently still. Though nowadays Love
stalks kingly in the forefront of motive, Elizabethan
men were not ashamed to put either of the others first.
Even Othello's great love was compound of the ambition
to be master in his own house and husband of his own
wife.

" One word is too often profaned " So often that

I will not. And because I think Love, in my exquisite
sense, is too beautiful and too rare. Once in a blue moon !
The blossoming of an aloe ! I confess I should like to
see the word and the particular emotion it describes,
relegated to the categories of abnormality — used to signify
some monstrous spiritual growth. For me the propa-
ganda which makes the world go round — not on — is liking,
not love, liking with a little " 1," not Love with a big
one, jogging it all the time so as to carry on in a desultory
manner the uncalled-for curse of existence by a series of
small shocks — as one might say the progression of a
motor-car. And what is Passion but a dangerous kind
of cargo that one takes on board, contraband more often
than not, and of absorbing interest to the mechanician
since it implies danger, stress, and effort, and entails
pains and penalties which may make a continuance of
the journey impossible.

The car run in the name of Love may be a good starter,
and there is always the chance that it may subside into
efficient and decorous easy-going, and so fare on to the
terminus, delivering its crew in very nearly as good

The Flurried Years n

condition as that in which they set out. Yet no man
" magnanimous and tender," no woman " passionate
and true " — I quote the great male summing up of these
special sex characteristics perpetrated by F. M. W.
Myers in his Poems long ago — would venture to talk of
Love in connection with its progress. But I think that
the expression Miss Austen uses to describe the strongest
emotion of which her worthier characters are capable —
Marianne Dashwood is out of court — might be used to
denote the slab-compound of sentiments and feelings
that enables a husband and wife to get on after several
years of union — Attachment.

" Love me little — love me long," is the proverb in-
vented for careful starters in matrimony, or the railway-
man's " White for right, and red for wrong, and green
for gently go along."

Love me little — that is, like me a great deal ; and liking
can last. Of course there are " Moments struck from
midnights ! " as the sober, burgomaster Browning says,
but the continuous cinematograph ends certainly in
boredom, and may end in tragedy. As Browning, too, said
of Professor Milsand of Avignon — a dull darling — I knew
him :

I have a friend over the sea.
I like him, but he loves me.

Half a tragedy, at any rate, there ! Poor little Milsand
was devoted. He was invited to stay every year, but he
was not happy. And then we have Swinburne's many
loves that are good to see — very good to see if the avoid-
ance of stress is any object. For one love is the devil
since it implies the obstination of sex. The love-liking
is, can be, everywhere ; love of lovers — of parents — of
brothers — of friends. And, partaking of our animal
nature, most surely combined with neglect and cruelty.
Each man and woman, too, is apt to kill the thing

12 The Flurried Years

he or she loves, and, being human, does not turn a hair
but being, peradventure, an author, writes about it.

Joseph Conrad, dealing masterly with these shifting
values, of which he was quietly cognisant, would seem
in his books to have selected one virtue for a master key
to open all locks in the House of emotional conjecture.
He chose that his world should rest on Fidelity. His
Love was a concentration on one particular object, of
steadfastness, honour, courage, pity, and generosity ;
" Old abstractions," Mr. Squire says, " to which he held
firm." With Conrad it represented a crime for a man
to question courage and honour, to stifle decent traditions
and conscience. Splendid, useless fidelity, like that of the
dog watching by its master's body, licking the hand
that will never stroke it again, perhaps never did, perhaps
struck it instead of caressing it. Or the silly boy on the
burning deck, with whose story our romantic yet common-
sensible childhood was fed. But when you get older you
find you can't better it. When nothing holds, when the
very scaffolding of one's ideals, honour, love, and the
rest, totters and crumbles, some absurd fetish of
endurance, some catch-word, like the noble slogan of the
Grants going into battle and shouting to the hills that
look down on them : " Stand fast, Craigellachie ! '
must serve our turn and steady our nerves. We don't
fight for King Charlie, but we go — or don't go — on,
bearing the world's annoy " with a sigh that is not quite
a sob, a smile that is not a grin."

Of once sown seed, who knoweth what the crop is ?
Alas, ray love. Love's eyes are very blind.
What would they have us do ? Sunflowers and poppies
Stoop to the wind.

So sang, artlessly, for he was only nineteen, Oliver
Madox Brown, who died so young and broke the heart
of his father. One does not know what he would have

The Flurried Years 13

done when his time came ? Bowed to the wind per-
haps— adopted the laisser faire attitude of the artist
like others of his race.

But one thing is certain, artist or no, man and woman
always, the crop belongs equally to the associate sowers
who have devoted their patch to the raising of it. Con-
rad's deification of the sense of responsibility in emotional
affairs is to me the high-water mark of civilisation. Wilde,
of course, put the case for crude animalism. Not to
kill " the thing he loves," according to the dictates of
the sadic brute that, willy-nilly, does reside in Man,
but to cherish it, maybe in boredom, is the real crux of
decency — to dig one's emotional crop in the sweat of
one's brow ; with conscientiousness to reap the harvest
of tares — or even of dragons' teeth.

I remember Oscar, before America, when he was really
still a slightly stuttering, slightly lisping, long-limbed
boy, sitting in the big arm-chair at Tor Villa, where we
lived then, lounging fatuously, tossing the long black
lock on his forehead that America swept away, and
talking — talking — happening to talk about maps and
other things. We did — father, mother, Oscar and I —
talk of anything we could any of us lay a hand to ; and
this Sunday evening it was maps — the maps of the
Ancients that he had been seeing : Africa.

" Oh, Miss Violet," he exclaimed, drawing his breath
through his teeth in a sibilant whisper of intense apprecia-
tion, " think of a map drawn of a whole continent, and
beside the names of an insignificant city or two a blank
and : Hie sunt hones ! Oh, Miss Violet, let you and
me go there."

" And get eaten by lions ? " said I.

Well, we did. I did. To Germany. And, one way
and another, I seem to have fought with wild beasts
all my life.

14 The Flurried Years

I have been called a sparrow ; but I think I am much
more like a robin — Heaven's Litigant, Blake calls him.
I have always been up against something — wanting to
alter something — fighting something. I do not invite
contest exactly ; it comes to me. When I was a child in
a perambulator the well of it was always full of petitions
against some abuse or other — the draining of Thirlmere
Lake ; the building over of the New Forest ; and, of
course, the early suffrage movement championed by
Miss Lydia Becker — which my mother was sedulously
sending round to one or other of her influential friends,
such as Robert Browning, John Millais, or Edward
Jones (as he was then) for signature. Oh, how cross
Mr. Jones was at being disturbed ! For he opened the
door himself, and glared with his mild blue eyes at the
German nurse who proffered the petition. He would
sit at ladies' feet, kiss their pale hands, but not those of
women who voted, so he told her.

When I grew up I threw myself anew into the Suffrage
movement, and should certainly have done my three
months in the terrible second division if it had not been
for the provisions I made for the care, delegated to me,
of an invalid mother and a young niece. Mrs. Pank-
hurst and Christabel kindly dispensed with my services
in extremis. So my nose remains in its own shape, not
squashed against the flank of a horse — voted by Miss
Evelyn Sharp as the safest place of all when the mounted
police were turned out to disperse us — or torn in the
efforts of the doctors to forcibly feed us. In the eighties
I was sent to Paris, on the advice of a good friend of my
mother, Mr. Crackanthorpe, to avoid the possibility
of being dragged ever so slightly into a divorce case, a
prime disaster for an unmarried girl in those Victorian
days.

So, one way or another, since I have grown to woman's
estate, I have been up against it — the Law, I mean. I

The Flurried Years 15

can scarcely count my appearances in those grim halls
before the blind Master in Lunacy, encounters with
what is worse than an enemy you cannot see and that
is an enemy who cannot see you, resisting, for my
mother and for pride's sake, the efforts of aunt and sister
to remove her from my care. And when the fighting
was all done in 1916 it was mine to attend once a week
with the accounts that I, in the intervals of writing
books and attending to social duties, had got ready for
the Official Receiver, whom I was " under."

Sitting on the edge of a chair, frightened out of my
life by the horrid implications of my " fiduciary posi-
tion " and this gloomy place, I would go through them
with a handsome young deputy of this important func-
tionary, with whom I had danced and might again.
While he was scrutinising them my eyes would rest on the
sill — used as a bookcase — of a window, cut in half to
light another room. In windows of this kind this exceed-
ingly ill-designed palace of justice abounds. It looks
one thing from the outside and another from the inside
— an apt description of the law, I think. And I would
observe a copy of my latest book, and wonder what they
had got it there for ? Anything I wrote could be carped
at, might contain grounds for " Actions." Then the
young man would say politely : " This item — eleven
shillings for parrot seed — seems excessive ? " And I
would reply in penitence : " Eleven pence. I am sorry
I write so badly."

Like Miss Flite, I have haunted for years the law
courts of this as well as those of other countries. But,
unlike Miss Flite, who was always " expecting a decision
shortly," and never got it, I have been favoured with
some very disagreeable ones prestissimo. I have had
the honour of bowing my head, with a large and fashion-
able hat on it, quite a number of times to its decrees,
in fact and in theory. My h^ad, with or without the

1 6 The Flurried Years

hat, is not, though bowed, " bloody," to quote the poet
Henley's touching vaunt. I have got lots of copy, and
I daresay I am a good deal better off than Miss Flite,
but indeed, je ne demande pas mieux than never to see
those grey stones again.

And I am sure I shall. For I am credulous, a non-
sifter of evidence, hasty, liking to scorch through to my
end, and, withal, egregiously, incredibly, sincere. Blatant
sincerity like mine always gets one suspected : it is so
much too good to be true.

But leave it at that, and life is very simple. You
have just got to choose a quelle sauce you will be devoured.
Choose your betrayer carefully, and pour ses beaux yeux.
It makes it easier to suffer.

When I was a little girl John Ruskin took me for a
long walk in the nut-woods at Brantwood, and, in reply
to some question of mine, told me simply :

" Find someone you can love and trust, and then
count no sacrifice too great to make in that one's
service."

And trust!

All the same, one has had the experience ; and I would
like to set down now, more or less, the things that
impressed one, the things that depressed one, as they fell
in the course of the flurried years 1908 to 1914. There
are some things no one tells, some things that no
woman tells, some things I cannot tell, but people know
them.

And, as a literary woman, my years of mark and
usefulness coincided with a great literary launch, that
of the "greatest Review in the world." This was in
1908, that began with such high hopes, both personal
and literary, and ended with the loss of the ship — several
ships, indeed, as full of precious and important mer-
chandise as those of the Merchant of Venice, for which
the lady of Belmont so sweetly indemnified him— and

The Flurried Years 17

the downing of a genius ; surely the greatest crime
that can be committed by mediocrities who ought to
know their places better and refuse to help to pull down
those who are doing a portion of the world's work.
To thwart such a one is, to my mind, a sin against
light.

I am one of those who believe that genius, of its
nature, is a state permanently bordering on frenzy, a
beatitude which entails certain pains and penalties that
no one else can shoulder, and some others which can
generally be delegated to disciples. Every genius should
have, must have, disciples.

The mechanism of genius is entirely different from
that of those who are expecting to benefit from its
ministrations. Genius must live ; the engine must be
stoked. Once, when Mr. Yeats and I were sitting in
the stalls at a suffrage matinee, listening to a very wonder-
ful and fat tenor singing lustily for the Cause, the poet
remarked : " It's a pity this kind of locomotive has to
wear its tender in front ! "

Another author, Mr. W. L. George, made a still more
cynical appraisement of a brother novelist : " He's just
a stomach with a brain on top." It seems to be generally
admitted that Genius is incapable of bearing, should
not be called upon to bear, all its own burdens ; its back
is not broad enough, or it bends and lets trouble go over
it. What can it do but, like sunflowers and poppies,
stoop to the wind.

Well, well ! What was done was done, and each bears
from thence onwards his own burden. Genius could not
be protected, although I tried, my self-imposed duties
including even the prevention of attempted suicide,
which, in those days, I conceived of as a mistake.

The year 1908 was the year of the Sicilian Players,
of the life-struggle for the Vote, of my old friend Somerset
Maugham's great dramatic break beginning with Lady

By

18 The Flurried Years

Frederick, of John Galsworthy's pet slum-child singers
of ballads at the Esperance Club. I had published my
best novel, and Ford Madox Hueffer the third volume
of his historical trilogy, The Fifth Queen Crowned.

Old Ford Madox Brown, his painter grandfather, was
my father's intimate friend, while the wonderful boy,
his uncle, who wrote the lyric I have quoted, sat at the
feet of my mother. I used to go to pre-Raphaelite
children's parties at the Seddons' and Tebbs' to help,
and often had to rap the fingers of the two high-spirited
Hueffer boys for playing ball with the penny buns ; and,
owing to my Corsican governesses, I was able to give
his father, the musical critic of The Times and introducer
of Wagner into this country, some notes about Corsica
for the libretto of Colombo,.

When next I met the wild, aggressive boy of the
children's parties who took to literature at sixteen and
published The Brown Owl, he was a man grown, married,
and with two children, to whom he wrote lovely poems.
It was at a dinner at John Galsworthy's. I will not
describe him. It is difficult for me. And even then,
although we walked home together along the Kensington
Road, talking of Pre-Raphaelitism and the price of
copper, I did not see him again for a year. Then suddenly
I was pitchforked by the kind offices of a friend into his
office and his great venture of the English Review, which
all that hot summer was simmering in the minds of its
promoters, Hueffer, Marwood, Conrad, and Wells, busily
collecting artists to write and men of good will to read
what they had written, arranging its lovely format
and type, and not neglecting the sweet uses of
advertisement.

My literary agent at that time was the late J. B.
Pinker, prince of agents, kindest friend to his clients
and a great rider to hounds. I have sat with him in his
office and observed the back of his head green with some

The Flurried Years 19

nasty fall he had had. " Jy B " I had known as a boy
in the office of Black and White, and he and I used to
race to get the foreign stamps out of the editor's waste-
paper basket for our collections. Early in this fateful
year I sent " Jy B " three stories to place, which he had
returned, saying that he could do nothing with them.
They have had a lot done with them since. In despair
I wrote to Mr. Wells, asking him if he could tell me where
to send them. He answered, on a speaking postcard :
" Send them to the English Review. It's It this year ! "
Of course Tono-Bungay was booked to come out
in it.

Although I had known the editor of the Review since
childhood, I had become rather a stranger to him, so
I begged H. G. to write to him and introduce me as a
wishful contributor. Then I got another postcard :
" He knows you quite well, he says ; and will you take
them to the office, 84 Holland Park Avenue ? "

The editor lived in his office, and the office was a
maisonette over a poulterer's and fishmonger's combined,
in the long road that leads to Oxford, bordered by nice
tall trees now, planted when I was a little girl going
daily past the shop on my way to school, the first of
the kind planned by Lady Stanley of Alderley, Miss
Russell Gurney, and all sorts of big-wigs, for the amal-
gamation in infancy of the classes and the masses.
Miss Mash, the greengrocer's daughter, and Miss Agnes
Lane Fox, now Lady Grove, sat on either side of me.
Miss Margaret Burne-Jones and Miss May Morris held
honoured places in the school. We did amalgamate,
all of us, very nicely, playing in the yard with a large
football presented by the foundress, and quarrelling as
much as was necessary for complete fellowship.

There was a chaste brown door — the side door of the
shop originally — with a gilt plaque, English Review,
Ltd., just over the bell. There was no need of a bell,

20 The Flurried Years

for, from the date of the installation of the Review, this,
the editor's house and home, was left permanently open
to all and sundry, contributors, burglars, and political

refugees. Vera F , the woman who shot at Stolypin,

found an asylum here in 1908. An English burglar
contrived, one summer afternoon, to steal all the editor's
spare tall hats, while Azef, the Russian spy, so he in-
formed me, was in the habit of coming in and ransacking
the editor's desk. Altogether, 84 Holland Park Avenue
seemed to be a mark for all sorts of Communist, Bolshevik
attempts, a regular danger-spot. On the pavement
outside a man had been sandbagged and left for dead ;
and Mr. Chandler, the poulterer, his landlord, and a
big, hefty, man carried his own takings to the bank
every day, but went continually in fear of a knife in
his back. The editor rather liked it.

Nothing more terrible than the sickly, depraved
smell of chickens assailed me as, opening the door, I
walked upstairs past the shop premises to the first
floor, where the editorial department was. Pre-
Raphaelite engravings, portraits of the editor's aunt,
Christina Rossetti, and his grandmother, Mrs. Ford
Madox Brown, photographs, Mr. Rothenstein's portraits
of Conrad and of other well-known people — lined the
stairs. The open door of a bathroom yawned half-
way up, and then there was a broad landing, ending in a
permanently open door which banged intermittently.
The editor's nerves luckily were not that kind. Anyone
could have invaded his hearth and home at any time.
It was emphatically not an Englishman's castle, in any
sense of the word, and he wore both his literary heart
and his valuable time on his sleeve.

The editorial department occupied the whole first
floor ; walls had been knocked into each other and
formed a large room, with three windows on the front
and one on the back looking on to Mr. Chandler's rubbish

The Flurried Years 21

yard. This room, full of corners and queernesses, I
was to know very well afterwards. Upstairs there
was a kitchen and a dining-room and two small bed-
rooms, one little more than a cupboard.

The staircase leading up there was obviously rickety,
but I did not go up that day. Invitations to the editor's
famous little home-cooked dinners came later.

The editor, wearing a brown velvet coat that had
belonged to Rossetti, came forward, and a lovely, golden-
haired girl whom he introduced as Hermosa. She was
going to be secretary to the Review, and was making tea.
I was shy ; I always am of editors, because they are so
powerful. I noticed some beautiful furniture, but very
little of it. A large Broadwood piano filled up one
corner, and there was a Chippendale bureau on which,
the editor said, Christina Rossetti had written her poems.
There was a cabinet that he said had belonged to the
Duke of Medina-Sidonia, that he had picked up for a
song. It was crammed with manuscripts, rammed in
anyhow, bulging, sagging, sprouting out of the beautiful
incrusted doors, and was in a shocking state. After
tea, and not till then, the editor took my manuscripts
all together between his two hands, and, opening and
shutting them, flirted the pages. . . . There were three
long-short stories. . . .

He said suddenly, pausing at the middle one : " I'll
take this."

I said, " But you haven't read it ! "

He had chosen " The Coach," rather a nice tale of
the uneasy, which I had written wandering along the
shores of the Cromarty Firth when I was staying at
Invergordon with the Monds. Well, that was that !

Three days later I lunched with him and Hermosa
and Stephen Reynolds — his partner, secretary, I know
not what — in the back room of the pastrycook's next
door, for the editor kept no servants. Mrs. Mill er

22 The Flurried Years

a nice old thing who was kitchenmaid to the Bencken-
dorfs at the Russian Embassy, came in every morning
for an hour or two. She used to fill a coal-scuttle timed
to last the day, and if the editor wanted any more he
had to fill it himself from the coal-cellar at the bottom
of the garden, which grew nothing but empty packing-
cases and reams of discarded packing paper, and — the
moment the Review was really started — priceless manu-
scripts that the rabbits of Mr. Chandler browsed upon.
I do not know who did the sweeping, but I suspect that
Hermosa, the dainty presiding goddess, saw to it that
the room was dusted and the curtains fresh. She was
beautiful and austere, kind and cold — an admirable
secretary for a literary man to have. She put the papers
back, answered the letters, and generally tried to keep
the review and its editor straight.

Then I was made to work, to assist at the terrific
catering for the Review's prestige and opening number.
Manuscripts began to come in. Thomas Hardy's " Sun-
day Morning's Tragedy " came in in August ; and there
were all sorts of fusses about foreign contributors.

I left London at my invalid mother's wish, and took
her to the sea. Being modern Englishwomen full of
customary observances, it was considered impossible that
she or I should stay in town in August out of the season.
We went down to Bournemouth, to the house of the son
of an old friend, Kegan Paul, the publisher. Dan Leno,
very ill, imagining that he was the tall clock in the hall
that ran up and down once a day, the one borderland
patient allowed, was staying in the house at the time,
patient and inoffensive. Leaving my mother there in
Dr. Paul's care, I took a holiday for a month. My nicest
visits, on her account, could never last longer.

Since Wireless — wonderful Wireless — I have come to
believe that some sort of receiving station can be set up
under conditions of intense human sympathy, of which

The Flurried Years 23

neither the sender nor the recipient of messages sent is
necessarily cognisant, and I always have remembered
a song that Olga Lynn, at Torphins, used to sing to us
by request out of La Perichole :

Tu n'es pas beau, tu n'es pas riche,

Tu n'as mfime pas d 'esprit,

Et, pourtant, brigand, je t'adore. . . .

Several times in my life I have received such apparently
and obviously purposeless messages. Once I dreamed
that Rennell Rodd, a dancing partner of my youth, was
very ill somewhere and calling me by name. I woke and
told my sister. Since then, reading the memoirs of Wal-
burga, Lady Paget, I find that he was lying seriously ill
in Zanzibar that very day. I can only suppose that I
caught his desperate wireless intended for someone else.
And I have received two calls distinctly intended for me,
addressed to me, I think, with intention by a human being
in distress.

This first time was when I was in my apogee, fairly
young, healthy, contented, happy and gay, living in a
delicious, delirious haze of blue and gold in a castle by
the sea. The Monds had rented, at my suggestion,
Joyous Gard that year. And on the russet rock of
Bamborough, with the azure sky and sea ah round, in that
wonderful autumn of 1908, a sort of summons from a
desperate human heart came to me where, in this palace
which Lord Armstrong had evolved out of the ruins of a
mediaeval castle, I was living on the fat — on the richness —
of the land, listening to the strains of Norah Clench's
violin and Connie Goetze's soothing playing, sitting to
Sigismund in the old chapel, motoring into Scotland in
a Rolls-Royce, bathing from the golden sands by day,
and dancing by night in the hall with a semillant German
professor from Wurzburg who had married his English
girl pupil. It is a way German professors have. In the

24 The Flurried Years

rests I looked down from the window to see the white
foxes — the vicar had told us of them — playing on the
yellow beach blanched by moonlight.

And I was reminded of the editor, sitting patient
and forlorn in the swelter of London on his nest-egg of
the English Review. There was much that was German
in the air to remind me of him. Carlyon Bellairs, the
Member for Lynn, was terrorising us with the German
menace, distributing frightening leaflets, dinging into
our ears his projects for the expansion of the Navy, trying
to get signatures to a petition. . . . Taking me to an east
window, he would say in a fine, conspiratorial voice,
" Look there ! Straight across. There lie Cuxhaven
and the Kiel Canal, exactly opposite us, and England
prone — practically defenceless ! "

It was terrifying. There is along that coast a chain
of high basaltic rock crowned with castles all the way to
Scotland, but there are, in between, bights and bays
and even sands suitable for landing. But the Brunners
and the Monds did not much seem to want to contribute
to an increase of English ships, for there was " no danger
of a war " — " too many commercial interests involved on
both sides. ..." Bona fide they assured me of this,
and thought no evil, poor dears !

The German professor held his peace on these large
issues and talked to me on the Swinburne poems he was
slowly and strenuously translating, and I could not help
thinking of the lonely editor stewing at his desk in
the fetid airs of the poulterer's shop, spending his even-
ings in the Shepherd's Bush Empire near by, with an
untidy sheaf of manuscripts to read in the waits so as
to avoid looking at the advertisement curtain ; turning
out for air into the squalid passage alongside, and in
again. Both Mr. Goldring and Mrs. Conrad have
described his stormy mode of editing con amore.

The Flurried Years 25

Yes, he was drawing me. I felt I must do something.
Go home or write ? I had been far too happy to write
letters, but I pulled myself together and did so — a letter
containing vague messages of sympathy, as of an angel
stooping from heaven to a mortal in durance. And I
got a pathetic answer in the editor's own special mode.
Yes, everything was beastly, but he was plugging away.
No, he had been there all the time. When was I coming
back to help with the review? God was not Good.
Yet he prayed Him to bless me. His writer's cramp
was so bad that he could not write more.

While I was there I succeeded in buying, at auction,
the house on Campden Hill which my mother leased,
and got one of the Monds to be surety for the purchase-
money. Thenceforward my invalid mother became my
tenant and paid her rent to me — an impossible relation,
as I found it when she came to die, for the other bene-
ficiaries under her will could not be brought to see that
as landlord, I was entitled to claim reparations of the
outgoing tenant, like any other landlord.

It was all dragon's teeth that I was sowing that year,
and I should have left the salvation of F. M. H. alone,
for that, also, became an impossible relation. The male
must not depend on the female, even in business ; but
if love comes in the situation becomes more than impos-
sible. F. M. H. would have done very well without me ;
perhaps better, as I have come to see now.

But the octopus tentacle of the extreme need of the
artist-egotist for an Egeria — any number of Egerias —
— won. He got his way. I am cynical, and I do think
there was something of the literary octopus in the draw-
ing, insinuating pressure of his desire, flung greedily in
my direction. An editor in quest of assistants is like
a mother at a registry office, straining every nerve to
get a good nurse for her new-born child that is to knock

26 The Flurried Years

the world. The review was everything to him, and I
could jolly well help him with that ! A woman at a
loose end of life, with a visiting list of notabilities as
long as your arm and some experience of literature, and
especially of the genus review ! I had had a good deal
to do with certain Argonautical expeditions that never
attained the Golden Fleece, but were, all the same,
great and instructive adventures in many ways.

There was Chapman's Magazine — a well-filled grave-
yard full of the best short stories. And there was Black
and White, on which I spent the best blood of my girl-
hood. That was, perhaps, frankly commercial. But the
English Review was of the nature of a dynastic venture,
a Forlorn Hope led for the supremacy of the Kingdom
of Literature gone derelict, and the crown tossing about
somewhere in Fleet Street for him who would to take it.
A Jacobite laird, turning out with his clansmen, could
not have spoken of the object of the fight more earnestly
and solemnly than did Joseph Conrad. One should
have heard him when the principles, the abstract
moralities of journalism, were enjeu! Was it a question
of coalition with America, one of the gorgeous establish-
ments of organised mass literature that nibbled at the
little, plain, sober, high-souled Review with a view to
the absorption of so much good brain and blood to feed
the popular Minotaur ? An attack by some literary
faiseur, some editor-publisher of a lower literary morality ?
This would only mean, Conrad would say, the debasing
of those ideals which the editor's own published declara-
tion had set forth, embodied in the sweet and fatuous
circular which the Junta had drawn up, and which was
to guide the editorship of the Review.

" The only qualification for admission to the pages
of the Review will be — in the view of the Editors — either
distinction of individuality or force of conviction,

The Flurried Years 27

either literary gifts or earnestness of purpose, what-
ever the purpose may be — the criterion of inclusion
being the clarity of diction, the force or the illumina-
tive value of the views expressed. What will be
avoided will be superficiality of the specially modern
kind which is the inevitable consequence when nothing
but brevity of statement is aimed at. The English
Review will treat its readers, not as spoiled children
who must be amused by a variety of games, but with
the respectful consideration due to grown-up minds
whose leisure can be interested by something else than
the crispness and glitter of a popular statement."

The Editors ! Indeed, it is not difficult to discover
the concoctors of this gallant, grandiloquent manifesto.
I see one of the co-authors of Romance — his guiding pen
in every line — and this manifesto for a time was lived
up to. No paltering with noble ideals — high and irrecon-
cilable with popularity, unfortunately. No popular
concessions ! Even the rumour of such a thing in
London would be, Conrad said, " like a hint of failure,"
and "the Review may have to stop, but it must not
fail." Brave words, weren't they ? And it was mine
to hear them ! And my own timbers, deeply saturated
with mean journalistic experience, shivered. The ship
of the Argonauts — the good magazine that lives and
remains good — had yet to be built. But, anyway, to
the starters, the backers, the lenders of time and
money and credit, and to the mariners that sail her, the
glory and the odd hits ! " C'est bien assez," Conrad
said.

The money of cohorts of relations — German Hueffers,
Dutch Hueffers, Paris Hueffers : tremendously rich,
these Paris Hueffers ; good Catholics, building churches ;
one of them, Hermann, the banker, having married his
daughter to a French duke ; all agog, and pleased to

28 The Flurried Years

be called on to foster the English nephew's adventure
with some sinews of war — was forthcoming. So was
that of Arthur Pearson Marwood, the brave and gentle
Yorkshire squire, the best, most loving friend an editor
ever had — and wasted. He was of good birth and
upbringing ; un galant homme, as the foreigner, Conrad,
conceded, though he himself had never actually sought
" the man's " acquaintance — " He is more your friend
than mine." The childish reservations that obtain
among authors, as amongst schoolgirls ! Marwood was
an author, too — of a learned book on finance, and a
hopeless invalid ; a dandy in London and a farmer in
Kent, where he would be sitting up all night with pigs
and handling compost ; yet his tortoiseshell brushes
and trouser-presses used to electrify the editor's char-
woman when he came to stay at 84 Holland Park
Avenue.

Like Conrad, he must have loved the editor very much
to be able to stomach the smell of the chickens, to tolerate
the small, low-roofed bedroom, the general tight-
packedness which did not worry the host himself,
since he would have been able to sleep upon a board.
But, indeed, as Conrad used to say, the devotion of
Marwood to his friend was " a matter of common know-
ledge." Conrad raised his rugged eyebrows about it half in
fun. What advantage did one man seek when he trotted
after the other like a faithful dog ? " God only knows !
You, too, perhaps." Sinister. Quite unmeaning !

Mr. Marwood was seriously consulted with regard to
the merits of my importation into the affairs of the
Review as reader, occasional sub-editor, contributor, but
above all as a " society hand " and touter for rich,
influential subscribers. He took me a walk up Notting
Hill Square and back, giving me some hints on his own
account, as you might say. Then, having seen me home,
he would return to his eager friend at 84 and wag his

The Flurried Years 29

head. " Yes," he would say, " yes, she is a card " —
in the Bennettian sense.

For, flashing in, meteoric, business-like, was my old
acquaintance of the Paris boulevards, Arnold himself,
with his tuft of rich brown hair falling over his level
brow of genius, demanding his price and nothing but
his price, about which, however, there was to be no
paltering. " Well, I always pay my contributors exactly
what they ask." This was the editor's system. Some-
times they didn't ask at all, or suggested modestly the
derisive sum of a couple of guineas for a forty-pound
article, like Mr. Cunninghame Graham. But Arnold
Bennett sensibly insisted on the forty he had well earned
by " The Matador of the Five Towns."

" So there, in a manner of speaking, we all were."
The quotation of one of Henry James's favourite catch-
words is properly indicated in connection with the
personnel of this review. Indeed, they were all there,
some in the letter only — that is to say, the spirit. Thomas
Hardy, who used to send stories to the Contemporary
from Tooting when it was under the editorship of the
editor's father, was sending now to his son all the way
from Dorset. One never knew what literary sommite
one might meet in that long, country-house shaped office
and drawing-room combined. There was Stephen
Reynolds, author of that essay in the macabre, " The
Holy Mountain," lurching in unexpectedly with Bob
Woolley, his sailor mate, with whom he lived at
Sidmouth and let boats and rowed people about the
harbour, gathering pearls from the lips of clients as
they fell.

And always, as if he had walked straight up the Oxford
Road from the other end of it stretching back into
Wiltshire, was another great old friend of mine, the tall,
eagle-faced Mr. Hudson. I had met him for the first
time at a tea-party, when he was married and starving

30 The Flurried Years

in Southwick Crescent and I was a lively child too much
brought forward for her age, allowed to " pour tea "
for her mother's great friend, Mrs. Louise Chandler
Moulton. It was in one of those sets of furnished apart-
ments where that lady entertained her European friends
every season. I hope I gave him enough cake. He
may have been about forty-five, and his hair was already
grizzled. His skin was dark, and colour was on his high
cheek-bones which was not there in the last three years
of his life. He appeared to my eyes so foreign-looking
that I first missed, and then almost seemed to see, the
earrings in his ears and the scimitar in his sash. But he
was, in effect, wearing a blue serge reefer suit. He wore
mostly brown in later years. That he was physically
restless I would not say ; he had his long limbs in perfect
control ; but as he sat poised on the music-stool which
was all, in the press of celebrities, that Mrs. Moulton
was able to offer a late arrival, his attitude suggested a
half-tame, complaisant bird that will rest for a moment
on a bough or a plinth near you with seeming confidence
but is all the time summarising its way of escape from
your blandishments. I felt it so much, I suppose, that,
with childish bluntness, I remarked that I should not
have expected to meet him there. He said simply that
Mrs. Moulton had asked him, so he came. It was
a way she had — a good way with these shyer, wilder,
more modest celebrities she wanted to get to her
parties.

Nowadays he did not look much older, and, perhaps,
less hungry. And he was certainly shabbier. His dun,
travel-stained coat on his arm always looked as if, like
the clothes of the labourers whose fives he studied, it
had been rained on, wetted and dried, and wetted again.
But when he shrugged it off and laid it down he appeared
as neat, as graceful, and as well dressed as John Gals-
worthy, and that is saying a great deal. Both tall,

The Flurried Years 31

with figures that a tailor would delight to dress ; but I
see Mr. Galsworthy in spacious halls always, or, maybe,
at a race-meeting, but not stooping, abrogating his
height, like Mr. Hudson, under the eaves of a stone-
cropped roof in Marten or Broad Chalke,in any old cottage
room he might have taken wherein to concentrate on the
malfeasant life of the cuckoo and the sadly short engage-
ment here of that famous singer, the nightingale.

Quiet, gentle, urbane, abstracted: in both I would
observe " the spirit of deathless calm," which it is a pre-
rogative of some sorts of genius to maintain in all these
stations of the mind, in this swallow flight of our life —
the calm that was denied all along to the anxious ego
of Conrad, who was precluded from it, perhaps, by the
foreign airs that presided over his birth. Read Sintram,
that Teutonic nightmare of De la Motte Fouque, and
you will share the image that he inspired in me, and
realise the hectic, fierce, and passionate wesen of Conrad
which pervaded 84, that justified the editor's attitude of
almost cringing respect — the German's innate cult of
the mysterious superman. For Conrad was rather
mysterious ; present yet invisible, heard but in our
intimate expectations ; like the great god Pan who
lurked unseen. One never knew when he was about,
for, if he was, he did not always show, and his friend, by
order, perhaps, never said.

Once that autumn the editor and I were asked to a
quiet dinner with a poetess — now Lady Dilke — and her
husband, and he called for me. It was foggy, the worst
day of the year. We were eating quails stewed in wine,
with little green grapes in the cocottes with them.
Suddenly the editor let out that he had left Conrad at
home in Holland Park Avenue, sitting over the fire
with a bad cold. He was not allowed to hide his light
under a bushel any longer, and the telephone was used.
But Conrad — on the telephone I heard his queer, foreign

32 The Flurried Years

voice — refused to stir out in the fog, but was going
straight to bed. The editor drew a vivid picture of the
great man sitting, full of aches and pains, grouting there
in the lonely flat over a dying fire, and leaving even that
poor comfort for the colder one of the cubicular bedroom.
I thought that Joseph Conrad — his two Christian names,
as it happens — must be very fond of Joseph Leopold to
put up with the bedroom, but, then, he was used to the
cabins of merchant ships.

This was probably during one of his darker days — a
fit of toothache, perhaps ; one of those evil hours that
come to authors round about the enfantement of a master-
piece. For they are all to be masterpieces, and that
is why the merest, tiniest essay costs the writer of it
so dear. Conrad would think nothing of writing to me or
the editor a letter headed with, or in the corner, " Pray
for me these days ! " And we knew at once it was a
question of literary parturition.

For the curse of Eve lies very heavy on les vrais gens
de lettres, and they do not always get even the apple.
" In pain and travail shalt thou bring forth " — and,
what is worse, hate the bantling, take a dislike to the
infant that perhaps, instead of smiling up at you,
appears to be stillborn. Hear the cries, heart-rending,
that go up from their several desks ! Inspiration dead
and Imagination yet working in le vide ! This suggests
a form of torture that no one but a potential mechanician
could have devised for himself. Moans over the damn-
able worry of making a start with stuff in which one doesn't
believe ! But, all the same — damn it ! — " one goes on
spinning out of oneself like a disillusioned spider in a
gale." I am sure that particular author must, like his
friend Huddie, have watched long by some worm-eaten
outhouse door a hapless spider's gyrations, to have felt
like saying that !

" How to guard myself against the most deplorable

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The Flurried Years 33

of failures is my difficulty — the thing itself my haunting
fear and the necessity of writing, my despair." There
was hard-up-ness . . . there was gout . . . but I think
that toothache has a lot to do with such an exclama-
tion as " Really, I'm not fit to live ! " Conrad especially
would have nothing done to his teeth if he could
help it. No author, I have noticed, can easily bear
the file. The forceps, perhaps, and gas, but the file
is crueller than death, and it was, indeed, what killed
one author that I know of — or, rather, his avoidance of
it.

There seem to have been always such things as authors'
special dentists and doctors, whose mission it has been
to attend to the fraternity and their families. There was
Dr. Ogle, of Cavendish Square, and Dr. Quain, who
attended the Hunts and the Millais families, there was
Mr. Pootz or Deutz — I have spelt his name wrong, and
perhaps it is as well, for he was responsible for a great
deal of harm done to the grinders of Robert Browning
and Leighton and to my mother's, who execrated him.

The editor and Conrad and I about this time had the
same doctor — " Tebby-Tebb," as we called the queer,
clever, weedy man who stooped so for despair, not
laziness. Himself he could not save. But you called
him and he came, hasting, his baggy umbrella in front
of him, the flaps of his greatcoat nearly touching the
ground, looking like Santa Claus or the Old Go' Man
bringing the babies. He brought several Pre-Raphaelite
babies into the world and one of Conrad's. He was a
magician, a wonder-doctor, as one would have expected
from his quack-like appearance, white-complexioned,
blue-eyed, bewildered. ... He took your case home to
think out a cure for it — keeping it a terrible time. Say
you had something the matter with your fingers ? Weeks
hence he would reappear with a bag, put some unknown
drug into your shoulder, and, hey presto ! you were

Cy

34 The Flurried Years

cured. But how could a man like that make money ?
He was always poor — and likely to remain so.

And for literary accouchements we all had the same
practitioner, " Jy B " — " The Pinker of Agents," so
Conrad the Paladin called him. Conrad was generous,
for Pinker held most of us, and especially Conrad, in
the hollow of his hand. Had he not been a dear he could
have worked untold mischief among the manuscripts
and worried some of us out of our lives. Pinker was
my director as well, and had he managed to dispose of
those three short stories I sent him Mr. Wells would not
have sent me to the English Review with them, and I
should never have become intimate with the editor of
it, nor with Conrad. So there it is ! Peace be with
his bones !

This association — Damon and Pythias-like, — tender
and affectionate though shot with furies, arrogancies,
misunderstandings, scoldings and ill-acceptances of them :
of Joseph Leopold and Joseph Conrad — subsisted until
the Great War, when Conrad and I were left to correspond
about our precious pawns lent to England. It began
with Romance and their association in the writing of it.
The birth of Romance was a legend by the time I came
to know Conrad. I used to hear how they had lived
together for some time at The Pent, a tumbledown farm
under the shadow of a great cliff in the South Country,
where the kitchen has a wavy floor like the pavement of
St. Mark's, and perhaps for the same reason ; where the
man who ran the farm had his oozy midden in front
of the doorstep ; how Walter Crane, to whom they for
a time rented it, actually ventured to cut about the
sixteenth-century door lintel so as to get a Walter Crane
Children's Book motto over it ; how they would not
choose to dine together, because the carrying-out of
Conrad's high views of the proper correction of children
might offend the editor, who believed in letting his

The Flurried Years 35

infants ride over him. So they met only in the intervals
of what Conrad called " vile but indispensable sensual
gorging of grey matter." I have seen that wavy floor,
that motto over the door, that midden. I thought of
taking The Pent once, but the ridges might have tripped
me up, and the smell of decaying straw outside disgusted
me.

There these two, with their families, strove and
sorrowed and rejoiced together over the impersonal — if
you will have it so — works of the spirit, in which they
really and truly lived. They sighed together over the
paucity of the reviews of Romance ; they jubilated when
things looked up a little. That they were both in their
second editions — " mon cher, savez vons ? " — Conrad wrote
to the editor, who was in America meeting Samuel
Sidney McClure, much drawn by the puissant charm of
him. And then there was a slight reverse, but
Conrad bid his pal buck up, declaring that he had
by no means given up hope of seeing " the thing " soar
into the lofty altitudes of prosperity one day soon.
He " quite thought " it would run to ten thousand or so.

Or so !

And there were scoldings, too — what we used to call
fixes. A sight of Conrad was the plum that the editor
was in the habit of extending to " Well done, thou good
and faithful servant ! " and for once, perhaps, he had
pledged Conrad's time and amenity too far or too
malapropos.

" What do you mean ? What the devil do you mean ? "
No, Mr. Conrad knew nothing of the editor's relations
with, his friendship with, or his regard for, Miss C.
Miss C. had been described as an American lady whom
the editor wanted him to see — something to do with
McClure's magazine. She wanted a story from Conrad
and " God knows what " from somebody else : intended
descending on the great man on a certain day, arriving

36 The Flurried Years

at Smeeth by the 10.45 and leaving in the afternoon.
The fierce author shouts that he won't have it. The
proper thing for the lady to do was to ask for an interview.
It is obvious she did not ask because she did not want
it, but wanted to call on him casually. And Conrad
was not to be treated like that ! This was not the way
to serious business ! He was a man who could not
afford to be disturbed by casual visitors. . . .

The American lady did not get her interview. Indeed,
I do not think that Conrad ever cared very much for
the idea of America.

But the editor of the English Review was pursued by
the feu follets of American participation in his magazine
as long as the Review lasted. Conrad bade him detach
his mind from these fanciful undertakings and remember
that the fair fame of an honourable attempt lay open
to him, if not an unqualified success. He certainly had
the first.

I often wonder if S. S. M. could really have helped ;
if the editor was not, after all, more a man of the world
than Conrad, and had he got the rights of it ? The great
American monopolist editor and publisher was a per-
sonage. He was in London about the time of the first
number.

I got an invitation : " Cortege will leave the Savoy
about nine o'clock. ... I wouldn't disturb you so
cavalierly if S. S. M. wasn't so useful an acquaintance."
Naturally. I was to come at half-past nine to his box at
the Empire^ where Kyasht was dancing.

I soon gathered that he, the editor, and Percival
Gibbon had been dining at the Savoy, and that there had
been a three-cornered row and the dinner-rolls and even
knives had flown freely. Samuel Sidney may not have
taken part ; he gave me the impression of strength and
contained violence very rare in an American. Perhaps
Frocess, Co. Antrim, had something to do with the trempe

The Flurried Years 37

of his rather sinister personality. He seemed like a
large wild beast kept quiet by food at stated times. He
did not listen — at least, not to me — but treated me as
a merely inconsiderable member of the editor's literary
harem. At all events, I placed no stories with him,
though I allowed him to make me rather conspicuous.
It wasn't so bad as making me drink tea in the theatre,
but he did buy chocolates, and, between the acts, placed
one between my lips . . . and again. Having been
told " to be nice to him," I quietly held my mouth open
like a child in the nursery. The editor had bought me a
Teddy Bear glove from a man at the door as we came
in. We all got into a four-wheeler, and they dropped
me at my house, going on to finish the night at 84.
What was left of it after that, the editor informed me,
he had passed in tears. So much for an accaparant
personality !

Conrad was very sarcastic about this party, asking if
the great man had, perchance, offered to buy up the
Review and the editor, lock, stock, and barrel, including
84, the shop downstairs, and the adjacent Tube station,
so as to transplant the whole show to U.S.A., and with
it whip creation, break things, etc. " I shouldn't
wonder." But he hoped that all the American had got
from the editor was a soothing smile ? He could not
understand how the editor could take such a presti-
digitous person seriously, or why the editor insisted on
giving " me this stuff that makes me furious and
unhappy."

Unless words were wind, facts mist, the confidence
that the editor had placed in him a mere caprice of fancy,
and unless " an absolute loyalty of thought on my part
contra mundum " gave no privilege, then, indeed, Conrad
had no right to warn him. He always said, after one of
these candid outbursts, that he knew well that the editor
would dismiss all his objections of every sort with one

38 The Flurried Years

wave of the hand, but still he persisted. It cost him
much. Every intervention in the editor's affairs,
domestic, literary or business, he said, ensured him at
least four unhappy days, and there was no reason, that
he knew of, why he should be wretched " except from
sheer affection."

The truth was that Conrad was awfully fond of the
editor, and could not bear to see him " prodigal of toil
and talent," and making a mess of things generally, for
want of that sympathetic imagination of which one who
knew him best had accused him. On the other
hand, the attitude of the editor to Conrad was a
monument of humility, whatever the wife of his bosom
may say.

Conrad and James were, more or less, our mentors —
interchangeable. They both sermonised us both. I
had known Henry James longer than the editor had, but
he had the advantage of me as regards Conrad, and I
think he loved Conrad more than I loved James. Henry
James was kinder, less selfish ; Conrad was ruder, and
more lovable. The editor adored Conrad. I never heard
him speak of Conrad without the most reverent affection,
though he did allow himself to chip at him sometimes to
me. In matters of literature his attitude was servile,
positively. To James he posed merely as le jeune homme
modeste, but his native arrogance appeared to be com-
pletely obliterated when Conrad was in the room. He
imitated him, even to the point of cultivating in himself
some one or other of Conrad's phobias. All great men
have phobias. He used to say he suffered from agora-
phobia— or was it claustrophobia ? They seem to me
very interchangeable. A breakdown in the street or
a breakdown in a drawing-room, the market-place or
the field ? The Lake District is less lonely than a long
street in Bloomsbury where I have seen the editor weaken
and totter. These two confessed to sharing " queer

The Flurried Years 39

sensations of being no longer in this world " as they sat
writing. " Heart thumps, head swims ! " — " It's funny,
but startling." The thought of a journey made either
of them tremble. " I shirk going out into the road. . . .
I get over-excited and worried with new faces. . . .
Something peculiar with me ! "

Not so very peculiar for such cattle as these ! How one
recognises the symptoms of nervous breakdown that
assail all men who subsist on their own nervous energy,
and, peradventure, keep a family with it ! To feel, as
soon as a journey is threatened, that one is not coming
back again, is an elementary sensation of the kind. I
always feel it myself. And suicide ! Every author thinks
of suicide when he cannot get le mot juste, or is spinning
a web of fiction like the spider in a gale ; to adopt
Conrad's expressive phrase, " making an effort for copy
or die ! " It seems simpler almost to die. " The latter
the easier feat — and so beautifully final ! "

The interchange of these Morituri te Salutant is just
the waving of the arms resorted to after an effort of
conversation, the awful yawn of satiety, the sense of
virtue gone out of one.

The doyen of the Review, Henry James, lived mostly
in London now, " chaperoning himself." Modeste
Mignon I called him, after Balzac. He never, so far
as I know, honoured the office — which was also a
drawing-room — with his presence. I don't believe he
ever set foot in it. The purlieus of literature were not
for him ; he preferred to live among his raw material
in marble halls in the wealthy North ; on Aubusson
carpets in Paris. But he used to come to see me in my
house, nicely montee for entertaining, and to any one
of my three clubs. He delighted in my Saturdays at
the Socialist New Reform Club, where the members
consumed eggs beaten up in glasses, where the walls
were of a duck-coloured green, and the three windows

40 The Flurried Years

after dark enjoyed a view of the glittering pharos ad-
vertising Sir Thomas Dewar's excellent whiskey outlined
on a screen of Whistler blue. Mr. Bernard Shaw
appropriately tenants that room now.

It was quite unnecessary to be careful to whom you
introduced H. J., for if you were too particular, took
too much care of him, you might lose him a chance of
meeting a Mona Maltravers or a Princess Casamassima.

Nobody bored him ; he took care of that. That
immunity was included in the careful chaperoning of him-
self for which he was noted. I used to suffer, as other
people did who told him anything that might amuse
him, from the summarily truncated anecdote. He would
hold up a story as soon as he had got all he needed out
of it ; extend a finger — " Thank you, I've got as much
— all I want " — and leave you with the point of your
anecdote on your hands. You consoled yourself
with the reflection that he might have perhaps got
another Turn of the Screw out of your relation of
some childish aberration, or some more Spoils of
Poynton from your reminiscence of your old North
Country aunt.

My rattling, roaring, social existence seemed to hold
all sorts of queer lures and baits for him. I was his
" purple patch " — the Medusa head by which he envisaged
the less refined happenings of life and made his little
cautious descents into reality, the violet ray in his so
pure spectrum. I don't believe that in all his days he
ever came nearer to passion, to the stark human nature
of things, as at that time when I tried to force him down
into the arena to fight for me. I ought to have known
better. I had had a hint. Once I mentioned a dead
friend whom I had loved very much — and I actually
used the word of awe in this connection. It was at
breakfast in Lamb House. H. J. left his poached egg
on cereals and, rising with a little nervous cough,

The Flurried Years 41

courteously drew my attention to the picture of his
mother which hung over the sideboard !

Conrad, H. G. Wells, and Henry James formed, shall
I say, the South Coast Triumvirate whose best work,
generously afforded, " made " the English Review. H. G.
did not come to the office much. At least, I never
saw him there. The editor he " knew at home," riding
over from Sandgate to Aldington on his bicycle and
getting a drink of the mead which the editor brewed
according to the best mediaeval recipes. How often
have I heard the story of H. G.'s profound appreciation
of a glass of it — his foolish request for a second — the
mounting of his bicycle — the wanton wave of the hand —
the nettly ditch bed till morning. It may be true. I
am sure Mr. Wells will not care to contradict it.

The editor had many " ploys " besides his job of
writing novels and poetry. When he was not engaged
in making his friends tipsy he would talk to old men in
the village and old women — the immortalised " Meary "
of Bonnington. He would sit up all night to see the
ghost at Aldington Knoll, or cycle over to Rye to call on
the Master or the cranky Stephen Crane. On rainy
days he looked across at France and wrote wonderful
poetry about it. A beautiful life ! Why did he abandon
it for the mud flats of Notting Hill, the rows of Victorian
villas turned into shops, the stress, financial and other-
wise, the many-peopled office, the agitating coming and
going . . . ?

Our mutual passion for women's suffrage was a lien
between the editor and me, and the day came when I
was called upon to collect funds for the Cause. Miss
May Sinclair and myself were drafted off to hold collect-
ing-boxes for three whole days in High Street Station.
We were to pick up our wooden boxes at a stay-shop
near by. The woman there had kindly consented to
keep them against our appearance at three o'clock, but

42 The Flurried Years

she was very anxious for us to shut the door, hide the
boxes under our cloaks, and keep them there till we got
out of the shop, lest she lost custom through her favour-
ing of the suffragettes. The arcade that led up to the
station was not, at that time, a gay panorama of ladies'
hats, but a bare expanse on either side like the walls of
a tank and perhaps that aided the terrible impression
that was ours when, by concerted arrangement, May
and I flashed our boxes out. Much has been said of our
heroism in " standing outside to beg," and I fancy she
felt as I did — as if we had suddenly been stripped naked,
with a cross-sensation of being drowned in a tank and
gasping for breath. We had asked all our friends and
editors and readers to come and cheer us up as we stood
there pilloried, and they backed us up splendidly. Mr.
John Galsworthy sauntered along and tipped us im-
measurably and gallantly, and Mr. Laurence Housman
and Mr. Ford Madox Hueffer — everyone in fact, who
wished the movement well.

Later on came the terrible Albert Hall Meeting, when
a girl near me suddenly slashed out with a whip and cut
the face of the steward, and that of one of my friends who
was trying to silence or carry her out. Mrs. Meynell and
Mrs. C. F. G. Masterman and I, all three ardent for the
Cause, sat in a box and wept to see our friends so mauled
in the arena below — Miss Evelyn Sharp hustled, and
Mr. Henry Nevinson carried out by three stewards as
stiff as if he was being levitated, while Mr. Lloyd George,
friendly too, dabbing his eternal handkerchief to his
mouth, was on principle not permitted to speak. I,
unfortunately, had friends in both camps. I went to a
party of Mrs. Godfrey Benson's, and two suffragettes
preceded me upstairs to where Dorothea stood beside
Mr. Asquith. I heard the usual slogan, " Votes for
Women," and I have been told that my hostess blew a
police whistle which she had concealed somewhere about

The Flurried Years 43

her person, but I did not hear it. The two offending
ladies were kindly escorted downstairs by Mr. William
Woodhouse, and given a nice supper — unbeknown, I
suppose, to his hostess. But I said something to
Mr. Asquith, as in duty bound, when I shook hands :

" I say, why don't you give it us ? "

And he smiled as he always did when tackled on
this subject, as he smiled — nay, laughed — when, at
Lady Pearson's, some wag fastened our chairs together
at supper with a dinner napkin.

In December, after many and many a contretemps,
the first number of the English Review actually came
out, and Hardy's wonderful poem, which fronted it,
excited adverse criticism. Morals were still as they were
before the war. " Improper " — that word of horror
and awe — could still be applied by serious critics to a
masterpiece which described, surely in the most moving
stanzas ever penned, the feelings of a mother who finds
that, in all innocence, she has murdered her daughter
" uncalled for " by administering one of those home-
brewed potions commonly used for her purpose in
our sophisticated country-side. And Tono-Bungay —
where I figure, so he advised me, as Beatrice, the pert,
aristocratic lure of the enquiring, pathetic, and pushful
Wells boy who was the hero.

And to celebrate the birth of the Review, I suppose,
there was a Yuletide festival lasting nearly a week,
according to the manner of the ancients, at Holland Park
Avenue — plum puddings, Yule logs, chestnut-roasting
and snapdragon ; orgies of stickiness, and Father Christ-
mas's beard getting entangled in the candle sconces.
A letter was dictated to me for Stephen Reynolds, to tell
him that the children and Fraulein were coming up, and
that if he'd " like to come, a nice little bed would be
made up for him on the leads," for the children would

44 The Flurried Years

monopolise the best bedroom — their fond father would
bestow his length in the cubicle. That was the sort of
privation he never minded. The plank bed at Brixton
was doubtless no harder, so Elizabeth Schultz told me,
than the bed at 84 that was hers later, and she took all
the drawing-room cushions to mollify it.

This reception Conrad had proposed to attend if he
could put a boot on and " scrape up the shillings for his
fare." I don't know if he came, for I was not invited to
this so exclusively young party, though I attended the
one later in Christmas week, which was for grown-up
people, the children having been put to bed early. I was
mindful of that, and as I and my niece went up to the
dining-room to take off our cloaks, past their door, I
said to her :

" Don't talk. The children are asleep."

Two voices shouted in crushing juvenile contempt :

" Oh, no, we're not ! "

I don't know why they were sent to bed, because we
grown-ups were made to play the most childish of
games — Clumps, Honey-pots, not stopping short at
Hunt-the-slipper. I know we all seemed to be sitting
on the floor — Mr. Belloc — or wasn't he ? — V. H., the
Radford girls, Mrs. Garnett and her boy, who has
lately won three prizes with his Lady into Fox. There
was no one to curb the editor and his German instinct
for games. Wonderful paper frogs that raced, and
other mechanical toys that seemed, but were not,
perhaps, unworthy of a great mind unbending, and
the Review was launched.

1909

The Good Editor — Manuscripts in the Coalbin — Mr. Chandler's gorged
Rabbits — The Flowering of D. H. Lawrence — The Futurist Poison
Bottle — The Proposal — " Will you — if? " — "The long, long fight " —
Accept — The Beauty and Professor Ker — Selsey — " Blood upon the
buttercups " — Beauty ministers to Genius — " The most unselfish man
in the world " — The Eternal Error — Women cannot Save — A False
Assumption — A Bid for Happiness — Neck or Nothing — Importation
of Elizabeth Schultz — With Thomas Hardy to Aldebwgh — Ghost Stories
at Edward Clodd's — Professor Gilbert Murray and Mrs. Belloc Lowndes
— The " coon " singer at Harrington Mann's — The Vampire Review —
The Editor and Beauty's Mother — Sheringham and Aubrey Beardsley's
Sister — The first Lawyer's letter — Cranford in Normandy — Home —
Too Good to be Careful — Charing Cross — The Angry Goddess —
Appearances — Parallel with Violet Fane — The author of " Isabel
Carnaby " and Mr. Parnell's Drain Pipe.

I seemed to myself, by 1909, to have become quasi-
mistress of that office and all the strands of its business,
even the details of its housekeeping passing through my
willing but inapt fingers. The editor, the best editor,
qua editor, that has ever been, seemed like a babe unborn
in the guiding of mere worldly matters. Time and space
were nothing to him, except when it was a matter of
proofs and printing. And then he drove both printers
and compositors wild. Anyone could " do " him, and
for the present, I think, did not, respecting the pathetic
inefficiency of the great man, except when he had a
pen in his hand.

He seemed like an infant in charge of a motor-car,
living in a home that was not a home, but the shell
merely of his great venture, uncomfortable, inadequate
for all special needs, and yet forced by his will to maintain
them. About it there was, of course, no trace of feminine

45

46 The Flurried Years

daintiness, except for Hermosa who with her own fair
hands tidied up, dusted, and swept the room where
she worked, and sometimes even filled the coal-scuttle.
But she went away early, and some days did not come
at all. Needless to say, the editor preferred to sit in
the cold rather than get fuel out of the yard himself.
He was said to take the electric lamp to bed with him
by way of a hot-water bottle. As for his meals, his
Mrs. Miller was fond of buying ironclads of fat, slices
of cooked ham from the neighbouring pork-butcher's,
slabs of parchment called piecrust, for her master's
lunch, so that, for the most part, he preferred to feed,
and take his friends to feed, in the little back room of
the pastrycook's next door.

Tall, haggard, patient, and urbane, coughing and
eating his heart out ! That was the effect he produced
on my little niece, who, with more of motherly instinct
than I, used to go in and take away the linen and socks
to mend, and buy him hot-water bottles that he never
filled.

I found myself, without exactly knowing how it had
come about, to have adopted with her the dangerous
vocation of " minding," mending, and consoling a genius
by day, while by night, even, our time was not our
own.

I had got my mother to have the new telephone in-
stalled at home and an extra switch in my bedroom, and
so incurred the plague of being wakened in the dead of
night by what H. G. Wells in Boon calls the editor's
" languid, plangent tenor," bewailing his literary woes,
insinuating, indicating misery on the electric current
that, like Swinburne's stream, has come to be the vehicle
for all the misery under the sun and must be a constant
picnic for curious operators. He would describe with
eloquence the occurrence of what Pearl Craigie used
to call " quagmires," literary and household — the

The Flurried Years 47

misdeeds of Mr. Collinson the compositor, and Mr.
Chandler the landlord — two powers that were — proofs
not to hand, and Quarter Day. . . .

Mr. Chandler, vestryman, greengrocer, fish-salesman,
fruiterer and poulterer, and caterer for the Grosvenor
Gallery Restaurant, who lived below, looked like a good
old English gentleman and behaved like a family butler
to his tenant, to whom, for form's sake, he was constantly
giving notice and as constantly withdrawing it. I think
his " Fairy," as he called his large, handsome, and stout
wife, had a tendresse for the quiet, patient and long-
suffering literary gentleman upstairs, and flew to
cash cheques for him at a moment's notice. But of
course the Chandler menage had to live, and did, very
well.

The moment the Review was started the usual con-
course of friends, contributors, and would-be contributors
attended the editor's levees. He was out for new blood —
for talent if not for genius. He printed, so I believe, the
first articles of Norman Douglas, Gilbert Cannan, Wynd-
ham Lewis, and D. H. Lawrence.

That was a Moment ! The first blush — the blowing —
of Mr. Lawrence's flower of genius. I was, at that time,
reader. The editor handed me some manuscript poems
written in pencil and very close, which had come to him
from a young schoolmistress in the Midlands. She said
that her sweetheart was schoolmaster in the same school.
He was the son of a miner, and not very strong, but she
had copied out some of his poems, and would the editor
give them a glance ?

They were perfectly wonderful. The editor was beside
himself with pleasure at his discovery. Hermosa typed
them, and they went in in chunks. Letters were ex-
changed, and the young poet, bored and weary of his
life, teaching at Addiscombe, called at the office. He
was very like a board-school boy grown to man's estate.

48 The Flurried Years

He had the head of a child — the yellow hair with a
" feather " at the back, much as if a school-mate had
been having a game with it. His eyes, if I mistake not,
were very blue, his lips very red, and his face very white —
sinisterly so, for he looked consumptive.

His manner was gentle, modest, and tender, in a way
I did not associate with his upbringing. His father was
a " butty man," of a certain rank among miners, and I
found that he, his sisters, and his sweetheart met every
Saturday evening round the fire to read Verlaine and
Baudelaire, while commissioned not to allow his mother's
loaves to burn in the oven. He was more conversant
with decadent poetry than I or the editor, and that is
saying a great deal, in fact, I think he had studied it too
deeply.

I was in the habit of bringing to my mother's house
anyone who was likely to amuse her ; and who but
interesting people wrote for the Review ? One day when
dear Byles, the editor's best friend, and to be mine, had
just got back from Japan, D. H. Lawrence brought his
fiancee to lunch. She was like a brown bird, bright-eyed,
her little head covered with curling russet locks like
feathers. Obviously,, when at home, a dashing young
party. Here she was obviously nervous, but pulled it
off all right, though there was a snag when she turned
the russet head and asked my maid, who was handing
the potatoes, in a speaking whisper whether she should
keep her gloves on. I never saw her again, but I had a
great deal of correspondence with her, and she consulted
me about the publication of her own book, counter-blast
to her ex-sweetheart's version of the part played by
Miriam. The manuscript has, I believe, never been
published, and I cannot think why — perhaps because she
is happily married !

After the English Review was well started in January
the editor's courts were thronged socially. One never

The Flurried Years 49

knew what social figure or other would be suddenly and
secretly bitten with the lust of authorship. And the
Review was " It," as Mr. Wells had foretold. The editor
gave parties — I lent my maid and spoons, or he hired the
ex-butler of Sir Frederick Leighton, who had ushered in
Queen Victoria to see the President of the Royal Academy.
In the afternoons the office-drawing-room was filled with
what Mr. Douglas Sladen used to designate on his invita-
tions as " pretty women and brainy men." Many of the
women were political — Lady Barlow and Lady Low.
Present were Sidney Brooks, Percival Gibbon, Hilaire
Belloc, the Garnetts, some of the Wertheimer sisters, the
Rossetti girls, my beautiful school-fellow, Agnes Grove,
who always told me she had sat to Mr. Hardy for
" Tess." . . . There was the first Lady St. Davids, the
handsome Jewess, and there was Christabel Pankhurst,
looking like a young and pretty Queen Victoria.

For the men, I have already specified them, but I
have forgotten Baerlein, most faithful of friends. There
was handsome Miss Ada Potter, who thought so highly
of the dramatic possibilities of The Fifth Queen Crowned
that she put it on for one day at the Kingsway, herself
playing Queen Catherine Howard, and getting to support
her, Hearn, the living image of Henry VIII in the picture.

Only, like Cinderella's pumpkin carriage and its mice
footmen, all this glory vanished at dusk, and the editor
was left with a few broken sandwiches and half cups of
tea, with which nothing could be done till morning,
sitting by his dying fire and an empty coal-scuttle that
he was too lazy to go out and replenish, or thumping
his piano and shouting, " Madam, will you walk ? " for
his own dreary amusement and company. Mrs. Chandler,
in her room below, who pitied him, has often told me
this.

I am not implying that the editor was friendless. His
mother and his sister and Russian brother-in-law, who

Dy

50 The Flurried Years

had been a member of the first Duma and twice
imprisoned for a term of years in Peter and Paul, used
to come now and then. His cousins, the Rossetti girls,
sometimes paid him a visit, but I don't think old William
Rossetti ever came or that the editor ever went to him.
I think that the editor had borrowed too many of his
rare books and forgotten to return them.

A cheerful girl was his sister-in-law, Mary Martindale,
who shared a flat with his mother in Blythe Road. She
was beautiful in a simple way, like clear water and prim-
roses, had a ringing laugh which she used very often,
rather like the cuckoo's note, a raw call of earliest spring,
of which she reminded me. The Martindales were a very
handsome family. Dr. Martindale looks like a Spanish
grandee. And there was Hermosa, handsome and cheer-
ful too. But naturally these ladies cleared off about
six o'clock.

There was another habituee who paid her visits chiefly
in the evenings. I do not know how she occupied herself
in the day — manicuring her nails, I think ! She was of
the lazy, Slav type, a protegee of the editor, and she
called him " Papa."

He had rescued her in some sort of way, so I made
out from his romantic disquisitions on Elizabeth Schultz.
He was, like other romantics, tainted with the lust of
rescue- work, and he had picked up this young person
in the Empire lounge, and had suggested to her that she
should come and be respectable. He always said that
she was the thirteenth to whom he had made this proposi-
tion. This particular girl agreed. He had been drawn
to her by the queerest notion — that the soul of his first-
born who died had, somehow or other, found its way
into her body. She was gentle, shy, faint . . . inno-
cuous, like a flake of tarnished snow ; her white, heavy
moon-face, with its short Calmuck nose, wide red mouth,
and loops of black hair falling over a rather brutish

C7)

MARY MARTIN DALE

The Flurried Years 51

forehead, spoke of her Tartar descent. She came from
Konigsburg.

I had not then his confidence, but it seemed to me
that, during the long-delayed tarrying of Spring that
occurred that year, when fogs lasted well into March
and April, that the Hand of the Lord lay heavy on the
editor of the English Review in some way. It might
have been the journal, which was going very well, but
was costing its founder his life's blood in the way of
money. Already there had been talk of making it into
a company, and I think the German backers and relations
were being invited to put more money into it. I heard
talk of Uncle Friedrich and Aunt Antonia. Heavy
interest was being paid on their loans . . . there may
have been gifts. . . .

Or it might have been the suddenly provoked quarrel
with his beloved Marwood which was affecting the Editor's
feelings as well as the future of the Review. He had
been unkind to Marwood, and had visited what might
have been want of tact, or even grave failure of
discretion, on a faithful adherent " with Olympian
severity," so his mentors warned him. " You seem to
have done some crushing ! " was Conrad's opinion. Poor
Marwood was a nervous man, full of feeling, but not
endowed by nature with the means of letting off steam
possessed by the two doyens of the pen. " Un galant
hotnme tout bonnement ! " so Conrad, the great, the
generous, nobly testified — even in the moment of petty
irritation that drew from him nervous stagey phrases,
admiring this wondrous dog-like attachment of the
English country gentleman.

Marwood was a mathematician, a philosopher, an
economist. Perhaps he was too clever to look for, too
simple to realise, the capacity for petty jealousies implicit

52 The Flurried Years

in the psychology of these great nevroses, the incidence
of that earnest regard — virile, strong, permanent, vitiated
by storms and misunderstandings — which men of the
same metier, which is their unique preoccupation, come to
have for one another, and which is far more causative
of quarrels than any which may subsist between man
and woman. Marwood, in his noble simplicity, was
caught between two deeply sophisticated personalities,
and went about looking ill and unhappy. It is ill med-
dling between two of a trade, two with the diapason set
alike and evened in a common endeavour.

Oh, these weird nervous systems of writers, harassed
by the lust of production, their sensibilities sharpened,
their powers of perception duplicated and reduplicated,
like the lens of the biggest telescope in the world, that
a cloudy night yet will render useless, how they suffer !
And how determined they are in their moments of sanity
to " keep out of things " — other people's things ! Other
people's sex complications especially. Mentors they
may like to be ; as mentors they may be adopted, but
with our affairs of the heart they prefer to have nothing
to do, except to listen and gather copy, perhaps. An
advisory board for Ethics or Behaviour — yes, but even
Henry James, the precise and old-fashioned, refused to
moralise on or connect in any way Morals with the
perplexing, irrational, untidy passion of Love.

Once I spoke of Love by name to Henry James and got,
sweetly enough, snubbed. As for Conrad, he got quite
cross when once, en tete-a-tete, I invited him to take some
interest in that sort of thing for my sake. He spoke to
me just as he used to speak to the editor, asking, with
lifted eyebrows and savage twist of the upper lip :
" What object, what purpose, could be served by the
creation of equivocal situations — juggling with the reali-
ties of life ? " That was just what Love was, and nothing
else, the creator of equivocal situations. Art was the

The Flurried Years 53

only reality of life. He himself did not go in for love-
affairs, except of course, the master affair of all. He
did not envisage the fact, I suppose, that other literary
existences, imagining themselves capable of including
more than one, are ruined by the swelter entailed by
plurality of emotions.

It was never any use asking him to take sides, to speak
to this or that person, to engineer raccommodements. The
very atmosphere of arrangement and possible compromise
seemed terrible to him : "I can't breathe in situations
that are not clear." He abhorred plots and suspicions ;
" They are neither in my nature, my tradition, or my
experience." " Happy man ! " I said. " No, I am not
fine enough for them," he maintained whose work it
was to create situations, not unravel them — especially
in his society intime ; and with a lovely shrug and a
smile, as of an infant at bay, he murmured :

" We are just a pair of silly innocents."

So they were. So are all the devoted men and women
who work and have their being in the world of ideas,
using human substance merely as a dummy to hang
theories on, to demonstrate world philosophy, world
truths. . . . The first author was a savage who set
up to exemplify his notion of causation by an Old Man
with a white beard, calling him God the Father, and
figuring the brooding Spirit as the white bird of meekness.

The worst of it is that authors will not live like Simeon
Stylites, but will have relations gathered round them,
and instead of posing on a nice quiet pillar, go to live
in the country for peace. Peace ! Village life, as I have
found it, always means less peace than a sword. The
white geese on village greens cackle, the village grocer
gossips, the timid, derelict female souls for whom London
fight is too much make up for the want of a circulating
library by Many Inventions. . . . And so we get poor
Conrad complaining bitterly of the usual thing, to most

54 The Flurried Years

of us, here, there, and everywhere. Village potins, three-
cornered rows, wigs upon the green or on the marsh.
And he in Ham Street is all spikes at once, and his
friend a mush of indecision and dyspepsia in London.
He objects to be warned of " tensions in certain quarters,"
of " intrigues (vulgo : lies)." But when is there not
tension in village communities ? He takes refuge in
proverbial palliatives. No, nobody is as black as he is
painted. He won't give up anybody to please anybody.
Poor Marwood calls, looking very ill. " He won't live
long ! " so Conrad, with the ground-swell of irritation
still on him, says cruelly. And the Review loses a good
backer. And Alles ist hin for a time at 84.
It is even insinuated that it is my fault. Genius is ever
saying, " J 'accuse." That is its privilege.

I granted that privilege, for just then I too was singing
very small. Things were " riding " me, too. And I
had just heard of the death, far away in Switzerland, of
such a one as we women, roughly, and tenderly speaking,
choose to call " the only man we have ever loved."
Also, my uncle had just died in his house a few
yards away from the office. I was with my aunt
a great deal, and I had to attend her at the funeral in
the dreary church in Kensington Park Road, where the
music is in the Gregorian mode, than which there is no
greater assault on the emotions. Even a dog, listening
to it, will howl. And I knew what it would be like,
and, prepared to proffer some obscure reason or other,
I rushed into the office of the English Review on my way
there, in my unaccustomed black, for what ends, to
quote Conrad, God only knew. To gain comfort from
the editor's aloofness, perhaps ! I got my comfort, but
it was cold, a reach-me-down, for there was a cab at
the door and the luggage being taken off, and I found
the children there with Miss Edmee Van De Noot, and

The Flurried Years 55

so appropriative of their father that not a word could I
get from him. He looked a different man for the
moment.

We had got some idea of comforting each other for
the slings and arrows of literary fate, at least that is
the way we used to speak of it. He was by way of
himself preparing little dinners for one friend or perhaps
two. They were d la Russe. One evening, when I
arrived at half-past six, I found him upstairs in the little
kitchen, with his nice Japanese silk dressing-gown over
his shabby morning suit to preserve it from the grease
of the frying-pan. And, after all, the cutlets were
burned. Some meringues from the confectioner's next
door followed. He liked sweet things better than I —
eternal child that he was ! Then we went down, and he
began to tell me the plot of his new book he was writing,
for which a certain Sophie Delmas stood in his mind for
the heroine. As he read I looked at him critically. He
was no longer so dreadfully thin, since the cough had gone,
but he was white like a stick of asparagus grown in a
cellar ; at any rate, rather pasty. He smoked incessantly,
and it made his teeth black. His cuffs wanted
" trimming," and I made a note to tell my niece to
bring a pair of scissors.

It was rather cold. The light was not good. Shadows
were encroaching on the little oasis of light in which we
sat, he on a hideous red plush Victorian arm-chair, the
one blot on the room, and I on a chaise-longue that an
invalid had used. The depression was as one might say
of a fog — so thick you could cut it with a knife. He
talked of suicide in the intervals of reading, until I could
hardly bear it, of having insured his life for a large sum
which his children were to get after his death, but if he
committed suicide they would not get it. How to
manage ? He had it all ready. The great 'buses rolling

56 The Flurried Years

down the hill from Notting Hill Gate went straight past
his door — I could hear them as he spoke — and he would
throw himself under one of them after having taken
poison, and no one would think of having an autopsy
of the mangled corpse . . . and so on. . . .

I was distressed, and yet unbelieving. People who
talk of suicide are the last persons to commit it. The
best thing I could do would be to go home. He would
not see me home ; he never did, because Elizabeth Schultz
always came at twelve for half an hour's talk, to tell him
what she had been doing all day and all her little troubles.
So he wouldn't be quite alone. It was ten o'clock ; I
mentioned it, but in my heart of hearts I hated leaving him
until she came, though I did not want to meet the girl.
I rather deprecated her visits, yet after all it was no
affair of mine. Then I suddenly said I was thirsty and
he volunteered to get me some lemonade from the dining-
room upstairs. " Yes, yes, I'm thirsty," I said, but
really I was not. It was some hint from Fate that
prompted my request.

Left alone in the room I sat still and wondered what
there was for me to do ? There was something — some
mission, some duty to perform — for someone else's
husband ! Ridiculous ! It wasn't my business. Sup-
pose I just got up and went away ? Left the house and
ran home ? I had forgotten my latchkey, but my maid
was sitting up for me, and it was only ten. But another
" suppose ? " Suppose I came to 84 to-morrow to
fetch some more manuscripts to read and Hermosa met
me and said that something awful had happened ! That
talk of suicide — was it meant for me ? Was it a cry for
help from the intimate thought-reserve of another human
being ?

There was so little time ; it would not take him more
than two minutes to fetch that lemonade, unless indeed
he was making it — squeezing lemons. . . .

The Flurried Years 57

I had to do something, that was clear to me, but also,
no clear plan of action was mine. But I stayed, and
when he came down carrying the glass I got up and took
it from him and put it on the table.

What can a woman do ? There is the old, traditional
way of comfort . . . something of the sort ... I put
one hand on the lapel of his coat, using, I think it was,
the simple outsider's phrase :

" Don't look so unhappy ! "

The other hand, by the whl of Providence, stole to the
loose, open pocket of the brown velvet jacket that
Rossetti had once worn. It fished out a dark, fluted
bottle, inscribed in the Futurist colours of danger, Poison.
The blunt letters were like the head of a cobra suddenly
reared. I took it to the light, and he waited like a
condemned criminal.

" Were you ? " I said ; and he answered, " I was."

" Donkey ! " I said, and, keeping the bottle in my hand,
sought for my cloak and shouldered it. He said
anxiously, " Do you mean to give it me back ? "

" No ! " I was firm, and, for the first time after one
of our dinners, he walked home with me — and it was only
half-past ten when all was said and done.

I kept the bottle. I took my niece, whom I shall in
future call the Beauty for she was one, a round of visits,
and, when we came home, a course of balls. I neglected
the English Review for her sake. Balls in the city, when
we came home in the dawn at five and Fleet Street was
full of pigeons waddling about in the depression of the
road, where little accidental heaps of provender lay
scattered. Suffrage balls, where Professor Ker danced
with her like a two-year-old, and while the editor of the
English Review danced with Christabel Pankhurst, very
obtrusively feminine, holding up her long train with a
ribbon attached to her wrist in the Victorian method.

58 The Flurried Years

Visits to different places in England, where, to my niece's
delight, the editor, of whom we both had assumed
charge, always made an excuse to come too.

She and I were really enjoying a holiday from the
English Review at Selsey when one morning, as I was
walking down the High Street, looking towards London,
there suddenly appeared a dusty figure, on which every-
thing that should have been black was white, sprinting
along towards the address the child had given him.
He explained to us that he had won seven pounds in a
Derby sweepstake, and had, with his brother-in-law and
Bob Woolley, hired a car and set out for the South Coast.
Suspiciously near Chichester the car had broken down,
and he had escaped. . . .

Well, it was very nice, and all these children — editor,
niece, and the Heron Allen babies — played together,
and somehow that car did never get mended, or he
was never advised that it did, and in the end he sacrificed
his share of the return journey and came up by train with
us two. Something I said inspired one of the best
poems he ever wrote. I was looking out of the window
on the fields that run on each side all down the Peninsula,
and all at once I screamed from my corner :

" I see blood upon the buttercups ! "

The poor Beauty, thinking her aunt had gone mad,
crossed over to my side of the carriage to look, but saw
only Nature's set scene that had been provoking
her own outcries for the last five minutes — an immense
hard, cold, yellow plain of buttercups growing close
together, stretching away from the carriage window
on both sides to the blue aniline sea, also on both sides,
since this was a peninsula. But I — morbid fool ! —
saw a third primary colour. Flakes and splashes and
pools of red lying, as it were, on the yellow pile of a
Maple carpet of flowers, as if an army had bled to death
on it. . . .

The Flurried Years 59

The horror lasted all day, and for days after. To the
editor it suggested a poem, but to me sheer ugly disaster
of some kind, not to be averted. Always the oiliness,
the thickness, the glutinousness of blood appals me when
I see it flow, even from a finger. I would never do for
a mediaeval lady watching a tournament ; I could not
look on the red-hung lists. Why are they hung with
red ? Is it so as not to dishearten the combatants by
the sight of the blood of fallen knights ? In the evening
of the next day he read me the poem he had dedicated
to me, in the garden opposite, sitting under a smoky,
black-boughed may-tree by the light of a London gas-
lamp. It was all about a duel . . . two knights . . . two
ladies . . . with an up-to-date tag . . . something about
" the long, long fight " that we moderns have to wage,
bloodless combats with pens for swords and the lists
drawn — not in the open air. . . .

And I, possibly, was still under the influence of this
vision the day after, when he made me an astounding,
romantic, nonsensical proposition, over the luncheon-
table among crumbled bread and smoking Irish stew,
speaking in a dead level tone, as if he had simply been
saying. " Have some more ! "

" Will you marry me if ever I am a divorced man ? "

It was an assay in Pre-Raphaelite crudity of expression,
as if a Madox Brown heavy oil-painting or an early
Elizabeth Siddal water-colour had been suddenly turned
into speech and I had nothing better to do than laugh
quite nervously and put the question by. He returned
to it again, and I got cross. " It was too sudden," as
Victorian ladies used to say, and I did not really think
he was serious. And, besides, I was thinking at that time
— all the time — of a freshly made grave at Clarens.

The pleasant contingency he lightly indicated did not
arise. Fate held other modes of making me useful — and

60 The Flurried Years

miserable. Less facile, more irksome, were to be my
ways, and full of the snares and snags that Character
lays for us, leading along to unthought-of disaster, and
ending in the lonelinesses and futilities of wasted
endeavour.
And now, Poor White Rose of Weary Leaf ;

I cannot see what pleasures
Or what pains were.

Glad, but not flushed with gladness,

Since joys go by;
Sad, but not bent with sadness,

Since sorrows die. . . .

They do. And one comes to sit by some Border
Stream in the Northland such as Swinburne describes,
with one's knees drawn up, throwing little tufts of grass
into the " wan water " at one's feet and seeing them
drift.

Old Loves and faded fears
Float down the stream that hears
The flowing of all men's tears
Under the sky.

Downstairs, sitting in the chaise-longue, too big for me,
that had been got in for someone else, I listened to the
editor, sitting opposite to me in a chair that was far too
small for him, as was the way in this topsy-turvy house
of art, reading aloud to me his new book, laying down
carefully with his fine discriminating hand one type-
written sheet after another as he finished it.

Hypnotised by the voice, inspired by it perhaps, my
personality seemed doubled, my intelligence twice as
efficient. I was able to think, sub rosa, of my own affairs,
past, present, and to come, neatly pursuing a separate
train of thought while taking in quite intelligently
what was being read to me. No discourtesy to the
author was involved ; I had discovered that his reading

The Flurried Years 61

was purely subjective, independent of his listener. Also
that he disdained criticism or comment of any kind ;
criticism ran off him like water off a duck's back ; com-
ment, even praiseful comment, merely interfered with
the psychic flow between himself and the medium
of the moment — me. I was attending as much,
and no more than, he wished. I was just a sounding-
board.

He himself was abundantly psychic. It helped him,
like any art that one practises efficiently. While taking
a deep interest in me, he took none in my life-history
or that of anyone else. But, did he so much as give
himself the trouble to think about it, he would find that
he knew everything, past, present, and to come. I
believe myself that everyone does know all the time,
but that the faculty for digging into our reserves of
knowledge varies considerably, and, in most people,
seems nearly atrophied.

His was certainly not. I have known this heavy man
repeat to me, word for word, parts of a conversation
held between myself and a soldier friend of his in a
cottage parlour in England while he himself was in France.
Before the editor returned Major V. died in hospital
in England. Telepathy will hardly do ; the matter
was too unimportant. One explanation would be that,
the author in the seer knew precisely what this so ordinary
soldier-man was likely to say to this so ordinary, jealous
woman. That would be merely the exercise of his
trade. Any author should be able to reconstruct the
scene.

But it is uncanny to be linked in some sort to a super-
natural being — as it were, the changeling of a nursery
tale. Fairies, it is well known, prefer to have their
infants brought up by human beings who have got salva-
tion. And the human mothers are naturally annoyed
by the wisdom of all the ages that the soulless fairy-child

62 The Flurried Years

possesses. It happens now and again that the human
baby gets stolen away and the fairy's substituted.
One woman, warned by a neighbour, proceeded to
cook her porridge amiss, so that the thousand-year-old
infant in the cradle by the fireside gave itself away by
correcting her : "I am as old as the hills, and I never
saw porridge made like that ! " The woman made the
sign of the cross over the elf-child, it flew up the chimney,
and her own baby smiled in its place.

A genius must have been the first changeling. So
new and so old, so wise and so simple, so innocent and
so knowing : a man grown, but remaining, since no one
has ever made the sign of the cross over him, the eternal
child. And it is but a doubtful privilege of Genius, the
retention of this child-mind, giving it, as it were, the
simili-best of both worlds, but nothing really of either,
which may prove its curse and its ruin. For Genius, like
the fabled scorpion when finally cornered, stings itself
with its own tail and commits suicide, aghast perhaps at
its own inevitable selfishness. Selfishness, ineluctable
factor, indispensable, everlasting stoker of the fires of
Genius ! Selfishness so solid, so extensive, that it
transcends the mean little vice we currently speak
of as a foible. Selfishness, like the protective colour
of animals, the use of which is absolutely necessary for
maintenance of the life and efficiency of the quality we
admire.

It is selfishness which, at the lowest, makes Germany
so strong, so efficient, so tough a customer — Germany,
which, at its best, gave us Goethe. The artist-selfish-
ness of Shelley, whose Cloud builds and unbuilds at
its wayward pleasure, and laughing at its own cenotaph.
Real genius laughs Homerically. I am sure Shakespeare
and Ben Jonson laughed well. One does not quarrel with
the deep, implicit selfishness of Nature who, whatever the
poet may say, does betray the heart that loves her. You

(*X

JOSEPH LEOPOLD

The Flurried Years 63

cannot live without betraying — even the animals you
eat ; you certainly cannot create without driving some
pitiful human being or other into a decline.

I put him off then quite easily — found some mot
juste or other, and he subsided for the time.

Much later I subscribed to his plans. The plangent,
languid, tenor voice overcame my north-country sensible-
ness, hypnotised me into folly, as it was meant it should
do. He returned to the charge politely, pertinaciously. . . .
I was moved more by what I saw and guessed of his
circumstances than by his arguments — though, indeed,
he did hold out tremendous prospects of mutual help
and avail. The literary world, an oyster which two
persons of Good Will could easily open and make so much
of for themselves and others — by means of the great
English Review !

Literature, which actually exists for itself, like a non-
tied public house, always hangs out this nattering bush.
The vague advertisement of philanthropy covers uncon-
sciously the fine egoism of the artist who works for the
pleasure and vanity of making and is properly paid only
in appreciation, although the fleshpots, such as a red brick
palace and a title, are not ungrateful to him. This is
demonstrable by the fact that the artist, even if he is not
paid either way, mostly goes on being an artist, a plain

Mr.", and lives in a garret. No real artist is lured
permanently to slipshodness by the prospect of red brick
palaces, etc. The pursuit of literature is more like
acting than people think, for the hands that are lifted,
the applause that dies down as soon as a newer sensation
comes along and wipes out his Moment, is all the artist-
actor cares for, really. It represents his immediate effect
on the subject of an experiment — for every book is an
experiment — some made on corpus very vile, when the
effort is made to get just a laugh or a popular success.

64 The Flurried Years

His miserable household got on my nerves. I deeply
desired to put an end to this state of things. Even as
we sat on this foggy, windy night in June, I heard the
saturnine creek of the standard something or other
recently installed by Mr. Chandler on the roof which
didn't work, which had fetched loose, and might any
moment fall through and crush us as we sat. The Editor
was too lazy to complain and have it taken away. The
window on the north over the dusty, papery garden
would not shut tight. I didn't at all like the feeling of
the outer door on to the street always open. . . . Suppos-
ing someone were to take it into their heads to walk up
— walk in ? An Azef or a Vera F. ?

And the people about the house, all excepting nice
Hermosa, coming in in the morning like a breath of warm
air from a kitchen where an aproned, rosy-cheeked woman
had been baking, smelling somehow like new-made bread.
But the cook here was a day woman, the kitchen was a
cubicle, with room for nothing but things that had got
thrown away behind the stove. Mrs. Miller was a nice,
clean old body, but terribly inefficient, and a gossip.
God knows what tales she took about, judging from those
she brought to us. Her egregious surmise about the
niece, delivered to my maid who came down now and
again to bring spoons and lay smart cloths for a party :
" Which of them is it ? The young or the old one ? ,:
And the funny little barber who came every day and
made the room temporarily into a shaving saloon. He
earned his living by perambulating the hill and shaving two
other Campden Hill worthies, Mr. Alexander, of Aubrey
House, and Mr. Rawlinson, both collectors of Whistlers,
Rembrandts, and Alfred Hunts, and both friends of my
father. It was naturally rather an expensive way of
being " barbed." The debility of the domestic arrange-
ments, the enormous coming and going for which no
provision was made ! Clean sheets for Mr. Marwood . . .

The Flurried Years 65

where ? A bath towel . . . but the bath wouldn't work
always. The periodical irruption of commanding, dog-
matic children — Shes who must be Obeyed — with their
foreign governess. And, implicit in the household,
though I hardly ever saw her, another foreigner, the pale,
pasty-faced Elizabeth Schultz, bored, pining, discontented,
dying to get away, with nowhere else to go . . . wanting
luxury, gaiety, new clothes . . . always leaving paper
patterns and powder-puffs about the room. . . .

All this purely domestic disorder was irritating to my
North Country, menseful soul. But there were higher
grounds for taking a hand. It was represented to me
that I might incidentally save a talent, to say the least ;
save a soul— as I had saved a life. Save something !
Not myself, for my life was over, buried in a grave. There
was no secret about that, although it was never
mentioned.

Women abhor being derelict, the having to face a void,
an empty room that will never need to be " turned out "
again — the crass sensation of uselessness. If they have
been unemployed long enough, they are carried off their
feet at once by the possibility of renewed sentimental
occupation, a seine quelconque a faire, even if it is but a
" turn " — not even a " star " one. This is, of course, a
desire that no man, except a Communist or a Nihilist, has
ever shared with them. Men, even in the tiniest ex-
peditions, are glad enough to leave the bridle on the
horse's neck, to rest on their oars so as to be able to go
farther in the day. But women ride headlong; catch
crabs, and tire themselves at once. Like men, they are
ready enough to fit out an Argo — at someone else's
expense for choice — but, unlike men, contemplate with
more equanimity the prospect of leaving their bones on a
desert beach in some Company's service. In fact, give
them a chance — only half a chance — and they will make
the usual fool of themselves. Not the Newest Woman

Ev

66 The Flurried Years

of all, but I happen to be the New Woman that people
wrote about in the nineties.

I was ready to commit the eternal error. I was full,
not of Love, but of Loving-kindness, and obsessed by
the permanent illusion of all women that they can Save.
His friends, Conrad, Marwood, Byles, dear Dollie Radford
— not so much mine — had dinned it into me.

But, in fact, Woman has always been powerless to
save, and there is no such thing as Loving -kindness
between her and Man . It is bound to be Love, or nothing,
with a dash of hate. The sexes are ravening beasts
when once you come to brass tacks. And as, in the
ancestral poem I have already quoted, " Of Love once
sown, who knoweth what the crop is ? " if it is an ill one
— a crop of dragon's teeth — it is left for Her to reap the
dreary harvest. As for salvage, it is well known that
the shipwrecked mariner turns against his rescuer ; and
sailors, wise and primitive men, will let a man drown
lest he live to do them an injury.

I was given to understand what was not — was not
then and never was to be — but I am sure that the more
deeply interested party to the affair had brought himself
to the point of believing. Wheedlers — people who can,
by the lure of the literary tongue, " kid " the intelligence
of others — do invariably possess inordinate powers of
self-deception. It takes deep conviction to convince :
neat and fine technique to be plausible. As for me,
ancillary events pushed to credence, and I was willing
to indulge the pleader.

There was not even then the slightest chance of things
falling out as he — as I, too, came to wish. I am supposed
to have the devil's own luck, having been born on a
Sunday, but, in this case, the devil did not fight for his
own. And as for the editor, he was born unlucky — and
well he knew it, regarding himself as one hated of the
high gods. He failed generally, to obtain popular

(I

LailU Chatia

MY NIECE

The Flurried Years 67

suffrage. " A lack of sympathetic imagination," as one
who had the best right to know said of him. He had
not the time to use tact. I wonder, did any genius
ever?

This was a turning-point as we reckoned it, but the
wrong way round. A gross miscalculation. The result,
perhaps, of that want of sympathetic imagination on
one side and blind adherence on the other. The whole
conduct of affairs, so far as one consciously manipulated
them, was based on a false assumption. . . . And away
we went !

But, " Lord, if I am deceived, it is by Thee," says
St. Augustine, and there are also Love's Martyrs " for
ever, ever dying," says Calantha in The Broken Heart,
and dances, dances among the reeling candles of the hall
as each messenger of woe comes in and tells her of new
deaths and calamities. . . .

I was very busy at this time — looking after my mother,
writing a novel, and chaperoning the Beauty through her
first season. She was like Romney's portrait of Lady
Hamilton — golden hair, dark eyebrows, blue eyes, pink
cheeks, and red lips, tall and a little clumsy. Her
adorers were many, and, as often happens, of a certain
age. Young men do not care for budding innocence.
Nor did she. We used to profit by the gaps which the
London season allows for refreshment. This Whitsun,
we went to Aldeburgh to stay with Mr. Edward Clodd,
whose cousin, who entertained for him at these house-
parties, was my dearest friend.

We travelled down with Thomas Hardy and Mrs.
Belloc Lowndes and a small Persian kitten in a basket,
and, though I knew it not till I got to Aldeburgh, the
editor and his protegee were in the same train.

You see, the editor of the English Review was so busy
he could not do without his secretary, even for a

68 The Flurried Years

week-end. There was quite a tiny scandal, but I thought I
knew why he did it ; philanthropy, a reckless instinct
for kindness that cost him nothing, a desire to give that
poor pathetic victim of life a short good time — walks
by the sea and so a wholesome appetite. She took
them by herself mostly. I managed to get away and
walk with her once as far as the golf links, that she pranced
over, looking every inch a foreigner, holding up her
dress over her ridiculous starched white petticoat . . .
afraid of the balls . . . she had never seen links in her
life. But she was perfectly happy at Aldeburgh, and
it made him happier so that later, when he went to stay
with the Bennetts in an hotel at Hastings, he took her
too, and gave tant soit pen umbrage to a lady who later
came to know him better.

A note was sent round to invite him with his secretary
to come in to supper on Sunday and meet Professor
Gilbert Murray. He came alone, of course. After
dinner, in that library of the distinguished scientist who
was also a sailor, like a ship's cabin with the telescope
pointed permanently out of the window, we sat round
and talked ghost-stories. The face of the friend and ally
of Huxley, the holder of the Animist theory, was worth
seeing as we raved and sentimentalised. Professor
Murray, not yet absolutely convinced of the survival
of consciousness after death, talked philosophically and
critically about apparitions. Thomas Hardy told ghost
stories just as a Wiltshire peasant might, sitting in the
ingle-nook of an old inn in Shaftesbury with a hand
on each knee. He told the story of the Collingwood caul
that someone, knowing his culte for Nelson, presented
to him. It is the skinny membrane found on the heads
of some babies at birth and preserved by the nurse for
luck. That of Nelson's friend, so preserved, Mr. Hardy
put on a shelf over his bed, where he could touch it.
In the night he heard it moving . . . shifting . . .

The Flurried Years 69

His zest for the macabre was not proof against tra-
ditional terrors inculcated at his mother's knee. He
returned the caul to the family.

In his soft, low, yet clear, wistful tones, he related his
one perennial dream.

" I am pursued, and I am rising like an angel up into
heaven, out of the hands of my earthly pursuers."
With a small, deprecating laugh, " I am agitated and
hampered, as I suppose an angel would not be, by — a
paucity of underlinen."

At Oxford my niece and I were guests of the austere
and darling Professor Ker. He naturally could not
put us up at All Souls, so he planted us at The Mitre,
and gave us dinner in College every night to meet all
the notabilities of Oxford. The Beauty, as usual, was
the guest of honour. " Prof," as she called him, adored
her, and I think her early death helped to break him up.
I forgathered with a dear old friend of Bamborough days,
the late Master of Balliol and his wife, whom I had known
since I was a child, and her son, Lionel, who was tutor
to the Prince and took him to Paris — a young god, but one
with whom I could not persuade my niece to fall in love.

And all the while I was getting screeds from the
disconsolate poet at home, containing jealous innuendos
of the Oxford don and what he called " imbecile details "
of his present preoccupation that " would look so funny
if they were ever printed and read out in court." A
premonition ! And also the usual imbecile flattery of
the beloved object. But every woman knows that
every other woman could not help being affected ever so
little at being called, all in one sentence, Helen of Troy
and Semiramis, St. Catherine of Siena and Christina
of Milan, " with a dash of Becky Sharp and the Blessed
Damozel ! " One wouldn't be human if one wasn't, and
one was.

70 The Flurried Years

We returned. It was July. The season was in full
swing, and the Beauty was sitting to Mr. Harrington Mann
in the mornings and dancing all night. The heart of
social London had turned to shady things and parties
in gardens, preferably under the stars. There was one
party in St. John's Wood — music inside and the hooting
of owls out. Supper was spread under the trees, while
in the lighted studio a Parisianised American was singing
coon songs. The Beauty, like a young white heifer
robed in sacrificial chiffon, danced, and we two chaperons
sat in the semi-dark where studio and garden, easels and
trees, met and were confounded. This means that the
windows were taken out. The sheen of white table-
cloths loomed under the trees, where earwigs and gnats
and blossoms dropped into the creams and jellies that we
poetical people hardly touched. . . . Dew falling. . . .
The clashing of bits and bridles and the chastened
gossip of coachmen in the lane of Melina outside fell on
our ear, and, from the studio, the caressing, insinuating
refrain, as if the singer, knowing the vanity of human
wishes, had his rueful tongue in his cheek all the time :

You shall have all you wa-ant and a little bit mo-ore.

It was fate. We all say so.

Alas, the eye of the builder falls covetously on those
useful waste places, and their day is not long ! The
William De Morgans gave a farewell party for The Vale —
condemned. Often I had passed its untidy gates in the
King's Road, but had never been inside the cat-haunted,
park-like grounds. I knew that Whistler had had a
house in there, and another painter, and Mr. and Mrs. De
Morgan a third house. There were three hosts to that
half-acre of land, and, in the semi-darkness, we and a
concourse of indistinguishable people that we knew if

The Flurried Years 71

we could have seen them wandered in and out of three
abodes, and wondered idly which of the little Victorian
cottages had been the Pink Palace where the lovely
model, Maud Franklin, had reigned, and wheeled the
baby in the perambulator dressed as a nurse. In one
of these houses there had been a terrible row when the
egoist artist discovered that Maud, neglected, scorned,
yet retained, had been posing to Stott of Oldham for
Venus. Now all is down, and I have sat with Margaret
Sackville and Mr. Ramsay Macdonald at lunch in a
smart house on the site of this garden of the past.

And about this time the editor spared a day to go
down to Tonbridge and have a talk with Edmee Van Der
Noot, and in the evening I took my maid with a basket
down to Holland Park Avenue, opened the door, mounted
the stair, and, carefully making the noise of four pairs of
feet so as to impress Mrs. Chandler, prepared a little
supper. We found some wine there, and we made sand-
wiches out of a tin of very special green tomatoes, and
very nasty they were. But when the traveller returned,
and we had drunk wine together in the good German
fashion, we neither of us cared for sandwiches. The
refrain of the Italian song from last night was still in our
ears. He said :

" There is pleasure in knowing that one can talk to a
person who understands one for the rest of one's life ;
that alone is heaven. . . . And you, in addition. . . .
Why, it is heaven and a little bit more."

The poor old Review, that had cost one hundred and
twenty pounds a month, and that people, in spite of my
superhuman touting, had not been so very anxious to
pay the enormous sum of two shillings and sixpence for,
was in liquidation. The efforts of Friedrich and Antonia
Hueffer and the might of the German mark would be
wasted unless a plutocrat could be found to purchase and

72 The Flurried Years

run it. The editor's fancy heavily turned to thoughts
of Samuel Sidney McClure. Miss Willa Cather was
excessively kind about it, and volunteered to write to
Samuel Sidney, with whom she had much influence, and
put the idea into his head. I think the woebegone aspect
of the editor, whose young but well-grown literary infant
it was threatened to remove from his care, touched her
to the heart. We used to go to tea with her in her hotel
opposite the British Museum gates and talk and talk.
Miss Willa Cather was gentle and quiet in manner ;
polite but withdrawn ; the modest self-sufficiency of
delicate and virile power.

She sat, almost god-like, on her pedestal on the Par-
nassian heights of McClure 's Magazine, or I understood
her to do so, and watched us squirm and rave in our
death-agony — the English Review's, I mean.

For, nice as she was to us about it, we felt the Review
was lost. Samuel Sidney was not taking any.

The editor, sensible of her kindness and interest in his
moribund infant, had only one way of repaying her —
his usual coin — an introduction to Conrad ; but that did
not come off. The great man was irritable and irritated
by some outside agent. Miss Cather, I think, never saw
the long white road in front of Capel House and the
French bulldog head, deep between his shoulders,
but smiling with all its fangs, of Joseph Conrad. He
always came up to time in this way. I mean, he would
refuse to see people, he habitually did refuse to see people,
but if he was persuaded to see people he turned on the
smile and did things properly.

The Beauty, having refused Count A., who owned half
Sicily and the revenue accruing from the particular brand
of champagne from which he took his name, went back
to her Northern home, preferring curates and cassocks
to counts and champagne . "So like Wuthering Heights ! ' '

The Flurried Years 73

the editor observed later, when he escorted my mother
there for her yearly month with Beauty's mother. But
I fancy he was alluding to the atmosphere of Bedburn,
for Beauty's home was excessively comfortable. His
visit was not a success. How could he have got on with a
simple sportsman and fisherman and local J. P., who had
got himself on to the board on purpose to deal with
poachers ! They were " miles apart," my sister said,
confessing she liked him best in his own milieu. She had
had quite a good time in the office of the Review, when
he had entertained her, and in the theatres where his
own Critical Attitude took him.

I realised that I had thrown pearls before swine in the
more recondite sense of the word, and I realised, too, that
the pearl had been lazy. He was accused, in no measured
language, by Beauty's mother of coming to her place in
order to rest his brains, and " playing the fool in order
to adapt himself to the intellect of his host." Beauty's
mother was no fool. Presently he begged to be, and was,
relieved by his sister-in-law, who stayed for the rest of
the time and brought my mother home. Mary Martin-
dale was Martha Martindale too. She doubled, so to
speak, these two scriptural parts. I wish she was here
with me now and had not gone to five in Germany.

Then he and I went on a series of visits. One was to
Goring Hall, where the Monds were that year, in the
very house, I believe, where Esther Waters was servant
and had the affair with the groom. A car was put at
our special service. And we went to see Sir Harry
Johnstone at Poling Priory, and the Roman villa at
Bignor, and the pictures at Petworth, and to consult
the Wise Woman of Storrington — a proceeding to which
I was averse, lest she said something discouraging. In
the evenings it was poker and pyramids into the small
hours, and the editor had the pleasure of losing a lot

74 The Flurried Years

of money. He could not play a bit. Manlike, he would
play. He certainly lost well.

Another visit was to Sheringham, where we found
Aubrey Beardsley's sister, Mabel Wright, sweet Catholic
saint whom the editor and everyone worshipped, and
to whom W. B. Yeats wrote his most beautiful poems —
"Our Lady of Pain." She always looked as if she had a
headache. She was now frail, thin, tall, and mediaeval, and
it was strange to remember her, buxom, girlish, playing
mistress of the house to Louie Freear's charwoman,
the stage resounding to " Sister Mary Jane's Top Note ! "
She never would talk about her brother — the most
charitable soul in the world ! The editor, in a summer-
house in the garden that moved on a pivot, dictated to
her some of his new book. Lovely ladies where he
happened to be staying were always proud to take up
their pens on his behalf, and so we wiled away the time
with bridge in the evenings and old Norfolk churches
in the day.

It was at Sheringham that one of those grotesque
letters that lawyers are put to it to write when it becomes
suddenly necessary for them to drop into the language of
romance, was handed to him. We were out on the lawn
playing croquet. He shoved it in his pocket and went on
playing — just as he did six years later on the golf links
at Selsey when a police officer handed him an order to
leave his house on the coast because he was supposed
to be a German, had a German name, and because his
English secretary insisted on wearing a soft Homburg
hat purchased in that region. Enemies in the neigh-
bourhood— and he had many — had been at work. He
took the letter then, gave it to his caddie to hold, and
made the best stroke he ever did in his life. It became
a usual experience. Enquiries were always being set
on foot by the envious. And I used to stymie police
officers by at once producing his English certificate

The Flurried Years 75

of birth kept ready. Three or four times that summer,
lying in my hammock among the apple-trees in that
seaside orchard, I have seen a bashful personage of this
description, sent down from London, advised of the traitor
in our midst, peeping slyly round the corner of the
cottage. I would say, languidly putting a leg out of the
hammock : "I know what you've come for," and run
in past the man, with his mouth open, and finding my
workbox, produce the well-thumbed certificate of birth
at Merton, in Surrey, with all the six baptismal names
so strangely German in character, wisely changed after-
wards. I would note the effect on the good British soul
in uniform, and, though longing to offer him a drink,
would refrain, since the poor dear would have to refuse
it.

It was near my birthday, and I have always regarded
it as the happiest birthday of my life, although we did
have our first quarrel about the fly to the station. We
were staying with an American dentist and his wife,
my friend, at a place — Beaumont le Roger — in the very
heart of Normandy. Their real home was in the Rue
de la Paix, where Mr. Farley carried on his practice
as a dentist. His wife was Irish, a Power, a descendant
of that Earl Ferrers who murdered his butler and had
the privilege of being hanged with a silken rope in view
of his high station. Farley was quite mad, and his
wife, Agnes, was just mad enough to be charming. A
large, fine, plain woman, whom sculptors admired.
She was young, but if she had lived to be old she would
have been like Horace Walpole's Madame du Deffand.
I introduced her to Arnold Bennett, who at once appre-
ciated her to the full and wrote a preface to her little
book on Beaumont. It is a charming, delicate Cranjord
— in Normandy, not Northants — and ought to be brought
out again. He used to show her his poems — eighteenth
oentury, rococo, French landscape pictures. But where

76 The Flurried Years

are they ? He has published, I think, nearly everything
but poems.

The house at Beaumont was one of those little wretched
villas that people built last century, both in England and
France, at the end of a large and straggling village — a
place where Madame Bovary might have lived and been
bored.

I was not bored in this villegiatura. The Risle ran
almost under the house, so that the bonne, stooping,
washed her salads and rinsed her dishes in its flow.
The rooms were hardly furnished, as a counterblast to
the magnificence of the flat in the Rue de la Paix and
there were very few of them. He slept au gr enter and I
in a sort of shabby annexe to the bedroom of Monsieur and
Madame. If I had wanted to get out I should have
had to enjamber their bed, and, if I wasn't careful, displace
one of the bricks that were placed on top of each other
to make the fourth leg of my own " maid's bed," as
they called it — jog it, and all would be lost !

The editor dictated to me and Agnes alternately a
novel called The Portrait, sitting on the purple heights
of Grosly. In the afternoons we walked in the woods,
where boars lurked and were sometimes hunted, or
helped William Farley, who was " resting," and, with a
pole instead of forceps, attempting to clear the river of
weeds and find the pike that ate fish and that nobody
had ever seen. Or we would take a rickety caliche and
visit Lisieux Cathedral, or some old, mediaeval chateau
ruined by the Revolution, where, on the ground
floor, old black-robed peasant women pottered about
among dressers covered with bowls of pale primrose-
coloured cream, that relieved the grey of the strong
stone walls, still fit for a siege, of Harcourt. Or we would
walk among high hedges, across marshes, by straggling,
forgotten paths, to this or that old ruined manoir that
would not let. A cause des revenants 1 And to peer

The Flurried Years 77

between gaps in the blocks of loosened stone and see
inside, rising out of straw and rags where pigs and tinkers
and gipsies had been sleeping, the traces of casual fires
lit on the floor, not in the fireplace, under the old
Francois Premier mantel. And home to good cottage
cooking — omelettes, poulets with white wine, and lashings
of Calvados, the wonderful apple cordial of the place. The
omelettes were not always good. Once, when Agnes
was out, the maid came to me and said madame had
commanded an omelette and how was she to make it ?
I said, confounded at her asking me such a thing :

" Oh, the usual way, I suppose."

That night the sweet came up all prettily flaring — an
omelette aux rhum. I tasted it. I thought it was queer,
and looked round at the others. Obviously they also
thought it was queer, and then — I bit upon an onion !

At Evreux, where we decided to go for my birthday
treat, a short railway journey away from Beaumont, the
Cathedral was all draped and starred — gold on that
peculiar French blue that expresses them, and red, of
course. All was being got ready for the canonisation
of Joan of Arc. We two English of the country that
burned her cut but a sorry figure. Still, all was clean,
clear, and lovely that day, and our lunch delicious — no
absurd, combined sweet and savoury omelette — and the
cloakroom and bathroom of the hotel exquisite, white
tiled, with silver taps, lace pin-cushions, fancy soaps, and
the rest of it — a perfect bower of bliss ; so I came back
and told him, because in little French country towns —
and English, too — this was wonderful and unusual.

But we had to go home for the sake of the English
Review, of which, though it was now run by a company,
he was still editor. Hermosa was caretaker, and ex-
pected him on Friday some time.

I had got rather ill, and could not risk a night passage

78 The Flurried Years

and return the way we had come — via Southampton
and Havre — so it was decided that we should start on
Thursday morning instead of Friday night, arrive in
Paris at twelve, and get off by the two o'clock boat,
arriving at ten-thirty on Thursday night. This would
avoid the night journey. We each sent a telegram, I
to my maid to meet me, and the editor to Hermosa,
advising her of the change of plan, begging her to be
at her desk on Friday at ten sharp in order to begin
work. By this he would gain a day and all was well.

It was far worse for me than travelling at night as it
happened, for we had a wet crossing and a long one,
and we had chosen to stop on deck. One experienced
the usual relief of getting into the rather uncomfortable
train that, after the tossing boat, appears so nice, calm,
stable and English. Half asleep in my corner I watched
for the lights of Smeeth as we rattled by in the dark but
I could tell by instinct where the queer, diabolically
shaped tower of Aldington Church must be. He of
course knew it well but how often have I seen that
eldritch tower since in my dreams ? Aldington, with its
church and its haunted Knoll, is an uncanny place that
he has written about often.

The ghost must have laughed ! The devilry of
Aldington was perhaps responsible for what followed —
our neglect of ordinary precautions. We were so good we
were careless and I, so neatly chaperoned while I was in
France, tant soit peu relaxed when I set foot on the
shores of England. One of us surely ought to have got
out at Hither Green and the other have entered Charing
Cross alone. But I was cold, tired and weak ... a
drowned rat dying to get home. I walked after the porter
and my luggage. Why did the steps of my companion
weaken? I noticed it . . . raised my eyes, too weary
to take much in. . . .

But I got an eye-opener for an, after all, conventionally

The Flurried Years 79

well-regulated person and a chaperon of youth to boot !
There on the sort of rostrum where it seems passengers
stand to await the porters with their baggage through
the Customs . . . ! A vestal virgin suddenly confronted
with the irate goddess whose shrine she would seem to
have profaned, wasn't in it . . . !

And yet I was, if a drowned, a perfectly respectable
rat ! Appearances, which after all, on the face of it and
in the end, are all we humans have to go by, were against
me. For no one on the prosecuting side ever stops to
think that for real, intending criminals the easiest thing
in the world is to keep the said appearances up. It is
no use being good.

I used to know " Violet Fane," and hear how she had
written a novel in which she described poor Sir Philip's
" oyster eye," certainly not in hate, but rather too much
con amore. People suggested that it was perhaps because
she was newly a widow and he had not bounded to marry
her. So she wrote, not a memoir, but a roman d clef —
so much more respectable. For she was a woman of the
world, and women of the world in those days did not
publish straightforward reminiscences affording to every
Tom, Dick, and Harry chapter and verse concerning
what was none of their business ; pages peppered with
indiscretions that are not nowadays even indiscreet.
But, as it was, all the London of her time was shocked
at her modest appeal to an English gentleman's better
feeling, and it was quite on the cards that she might
be " cut." Agonies, consultations ! What did brave
Sophy Lamb do ? She took the social bull by the
horns and a walk in the Park at the fashionable hour,
bidding the courteous Sir Philip do likewise, spoke
kindly to him, and Appearances, Lover, and All were
saved.

But I was not Sophy Lamb, though I had a maid to
meet me all right. He delivered me up to her hands,

80 The Flurried Years

saying simply : " It's all up, old girl ! You will see.
There'll be no divorce."

Our preoccupation ran on rather separate lines at
this moment, though they converged in a common desire
for quite ordinary happiness. We thought we had a
right to expect it. But that dream, for him, was over.
He was an indurate cynic and no believer in the inherent
nobleness of human nature — feminine human nature
especially. His women — at least they seem so in his
novels — are Very Women, of a mere mediaeval morality,
behaving always at the dictates of the old-fashioned
feminine mental apparatus which we suffragettes hope
we have left behind. From that moment he was perfectly
aware that his name, in any sense agreeable to him, would
never figure in the Cause List, and that Elizabeth
Schultz might as well pack up and go home to Germany.

But I was not so safe on this point. I did not know
his Pappenheimer, and for many months to come I
went in the dread of the greatest misfortune that could,
at that still stringently Victorian epoch, befall an un-
married woman with a mother to take care of, and a girl
to chaperon ; and a large circle of friends and relations
to placate and keep in a good humour. Does post-
war woman realise the differentiation of the standard
of manners that has obtained since 1918 ? In pre-war
days Hamlet's brutal suggestion to the debutante
Ophelia was perfectly practical politics — " Be thou
chaste as ice and cold as snow, thou shalt not 'scape
calumny," or accept male escort in any circumstances
whatever. One could not go out in the dark, one could
not go out in the rain even, because one's dress was so
long that it took any amount of holding up lest it got
" messed " about the hem. One had to take, in fact,
all the care in the world to prevent one's flopping,
feminine, vulnerable character from getting smirched
or, at least, needing a new " bind." Marriage ?

The Flurried Years 81

Nowadays, when skirts are so short that even children
cannot reach up to their mother's apron-string — if she
wears one ; and actually the fashion of to-day shows a
little apron about as big and useful as that of Rosina, the
maid, in // Barbiere — there is no great danger of their
getting muddied, and one can be as careless as one likes,
short of total immersion in a mud bath at Piccadilly
Circus on a wet night.

I remember when I was a girl watching, fascinated,
at the Royal Academy private view, a woman I knew
— a shrinking, beautiful, famous creature — on the arm
of her brother-in-law, looking as if she wished the floor
would open and swallow her. She was being very brave,
for this was an appearance-saving device of sorts insti-
gated by her family with the collaboration of the supposed
injured wife, who came up and spoke to her quite nicely
in the course of the evening. They were famous persons,
all three — and deservedly so. They were exploiting
their fame — and they succeeded, just as did the lady
who became an Ambassadress, and was able to trail her
unpleasant leash of little dogs over the parquets of the
Embassy, to the disgust of the Roman ladies. Her
experiment was touch and go. All the Row was on its
hind legs, so another beauty of the period who was an
eye-witness tells me, to see if she would pull it off. And
my fair, frail friend and her brother-in-law were followed
through the rooms of Burlington House as though she
were Royalty.

The prestige of both these ladies, in their degree, saved
them — as, I suppose, mine did me. I had a great deal
" on " it — the care of my mother, the cherished long
visits of the Beauty. ... At that moment, standing
bewildered, worried, and frightened, I would have taken
cover — married anyone !

Certain gatherings to which, during my various terms
of chaperonage, I had allowed my niece to go, in essence

Fy

82 The Flurried Years

as respectable, as innocent, as they make them, would be
in these days considered as prim and as boring as a meet-
ing of Friends. The drawing-room at Holland Park
Avenue, even in those days styled a little Bohemian,
seemed quieter than the village schoolrooms where she
and her friends would meet once a week to discuss Scott's
Rokeby or The Odyssey. Talk of my taking her to 84
nowadays, and kindred places ! She would take me
to amuse me with what had long since ceased to amuse
or even startle her. Chaperonage, my pride and my
care in those days, is now obsolete. A chaperon is a
dodo — a lovely and darling dodo if you will. Bohemia
has lost its terrors and also its interest. The Yellow
Book was said by a witty journalist to have turned grey
in a single night of 1895 ; six years of after-war would
have made its poll as white as driven snow. It is young
girls who give the Bohemian parties now on top floors
in Bloomsbury, and the young men bring the drinks.
And other aunt's Beauties, self-willed and opinionated
fling their pretty caps over the windmill and recover
them, or make themselves a new one every morning.
And there is no cap to throw, for their own grandmothers
do not wear one.

And even in those days the most straitlaced were
not always as straitlaced as they seemed. I went down
to Eltham soon after this for lunch with one of the very
wittiest women in England. Lovely walks home across
the Park from women writers' dinners and committees
we used to have ! Her wit, easy, not too dry, human,
suited me exactly ; she had an old-fashioned turn
of mind, like me, that delighted and soothed me. She
was just like " Isabel Carnaby," who should not so
easily have been let die.

This day she was sitting with her father, her mother,
and her publisher. Her husband was at the school
where he was master, but he was taking me to the

The Flurried Years 83

ruins of ,the old palace after lunch ; but my hostess,
leading me up to her room to take off my hat, showed
me with some zest a modern relic far more exciting —
to her at least, but I like real antiquities. . . .

" Do you see that ? " she asked, pointing out of the
window across the park to a little low cottage opposite
nestling in some trees. That was all I saw.

" Look close at the side of the house, under the
window."

I looked, and saw a very ordinary drain-pipe running
up from the ground to that window.

" That," said the lady, " that is the very drain-
pipe that Mr. Parnell climbed up to get to Mrs.
O'Shea ! "

The mild antiquarian charm of the Palace of Eltham
must pale in the light of that.

1909-10

Lovers in London — Condition of the Review — The Harmless Necessary
Elizabeth at 84 — An Invitation to Rye — The " Veracious Pinker " —
The Arm of the Goddess — The Editor to Henry James — I too — Honesty
not the best Policy — " Lamentable, oh, lamentable ! " — Invitation
cancelled — Placards in High Street — Means to an End— Early Victorian
Revulsion — " Alas, how easily things go wrong ! " — Try another Way —
Amenities of Brixton Gaol — A Lost Legacy — Wylye and Marten —
Hunt for Hudson — Messages from Conrad and James — " Dear Violet "
again — Teas and Tennis — American Poets and Beauties — Hudson
and Ann Veronica — The Cabaret Club and Madame Strindberg —
Arnold Bennett and my Mother — Gaiety and Gloom — Waiting for a
Move — No " Consequences in the Stars."

That was a black autumn. Influenza was very bad.
The whole of the new Mrs. Arnold Bennett's stay in
England was ruined by it, so her husband wrote, and we
never saw either of them. We walked every day together
in Kensington Gardens and sometimes as far as the
Row where, among the determined winter riders,
Cunninghame Graham on his Arab waved to us, walking
along by the railings. Or in the sunken garden by the
Orangery to avoid the wind, or :

On the sodden grass

The black sheep straggling here and there.

And the sullen pond, like a looking-glass —
I'd rather be here than anywhere I

This quotation, from a poem called " Lovers in London,"
the composite work of Andrew Lang and myself, suited
our mood.

There was very little to be pleased about. The English
Review, like a fine lusty baby well started in life, that
only wanted money for its special foods and up-to-date
feeding bottles, was slipping, had slipped, out of the

84

The Flurried Years 85

editor's yearning arms. He edited it, but it was no
longer his own, his own invention, on which he had
thought nothing of dropping a hundred and twenty
pounds a month. We hardly spoke of it, but of the
ducks, of Oliver Cromwell's defences and the expense
of laying out the borders with spring flowers, an expense
to which I objected, and was at once called hard and
" North Country." Any stick will do for a sick man
to beat a sympathising dog with.

Then he went back to his desk, and I did not see him
all day — for I was now not allowed to go to the office
any more — until the evening, when he would come and
dine with my mother and myself, and then play picquet
with her, sing to me, and at eleven sharp I would let
him out and close the door behind him, and he would
return to his cheerless home, where Elizabeth Schultz
was now domiciled. Mrs. Miller was gone. They had
to have a cook now, a German called Gertrud, and she
had a son. I heard of him now and then. Elizabeth
kept house rather expensively, I gathered. She was
preoccupied by herself, her nails, and a cageful of
Budgerigars, and the cage kept falling down and killing
a bird now and then, when she wept. Germans are
fonder of birds than of other pets. The poet cherished
her greatly and insisted on her being put forward as
much as possible. She was shy and modest, and depre-
cating of her appearance. Yet people admired her.

May, who saw her once at a party at 84, where she
had been persuaded to appear and pour out tea, dressed
in one of my frocks — grey mock fur made tight and plain
in the new mode that was coming in — asked me who the
beautiful, pale, Russian princess was ?

Silent, unseen except on this one occasion, she was
like a sickly, discontented spirit about the house. I
had never felt at ease in it since she came there, yet she
liked me, and shyly confided in me. She wanted her

86 The Flurried Years

Papa — she pronounced the a's short — to set her up in a
dressmaking business.

I thought the importation of this young lady a mistake.
She was supposed to be housekeeper, but she was quite
a muff at that, and permitted her compatriot to do as
she would. Mr. Chandler and " the Fairy " often
confided to me their painful surmises. There was far
too much going up and down stairs of the out-of-work
son carrying black shiny bags, which, Chandler averred,
contained whole legs of mutton ordered of him in the
master's name. And an immense amount of white wine
from the grocer's next door for kitchen use that never
got into the stews ! But the editor was not one to
count the cost — any cost — in any case.

And Henry James was ill, too. I wrote to him, and
received in return a letter combining the suavity of the
host with the touchiness of the invalid :

" Lamb House,
" Rye,

" Sussex.
" October 31st, 1909.
" My Dear Violet, — Yes, indeed, I am at Rye —
where else should I be ? For I am here pretty well
always and ever, and less and less anywhere else. There
are advantages preponderant in that ; but there are
also drawbacks ; one of which is that I am liable to
go so long without seeing you. But to this, on the
other hand, there are possible remedies — as, for
instance, that of your conceivably (I hope) coming
down here for a couple of nights before very long. Is
this thinkable to you ? Not unaware as you are of
my homely and solitary state, my limited resources,
my austere conditions, and frugal though earnest
hospitality. I am more and more aged, infirm, and
unattractive, but I make such a stand as I can, and

The Flurried Years 87

shall be very glad to see you if you can brave the
adventure or face such a tiresome displacement on
such meagre terms. We can have a long jaw (with
lots of arrears to make up), and, weather permitting,
eke a short walk. The week-end would suit me (though
I am not restricted to that) of almost any of the next
weeks, and you could perhaps then take the Saturday
a.m. train and get here for luncheon — in which case
we could take even two walks. Let me know what
I may hope, and that health and peace attend you,
and believe me to be,

" Yours ever,
" Henry James."

I accepted with the usual heartily expressed elation
— that was merely respect — but I think I really rather
loved Henry James ; I had known him so long, and as
a plastic schoolgirl. But it was not to be. My pitch
was queered damnably. . . . There had been signs . . .
rumbhngs. . . . One evening I got a short note from H.G.
much distracted by something " the veracious Pinker "
had told him. He did hope I wasn't going to get into
another mess — any mess — a particular mess he had heard
of ? Dear H. G. !

Pinker always knew everything, and was always looking
out to do something kind and apposite with his know-
ledge. And a week after I had accepted I received letters
from Henry James which decidedly knocked the first
nail into my coffin. For observe the change of title —
a change subtle and cruel !

" Dear Violet Hunt, — I should be writing to you
to-night to say that it would give me great pleasure
to see you on Saturday next had I not received by
the same post which brought me your letter one from
, which your mention of the fact that you have

88 The Flurried Years

known the writing of it enables me thus to allude to
as depriving, by its contents, our projected occasion
of indispensable elements of frankness and pleasant-
ness. I deeply lament and deplore the lamentable
position in which I gather you have put yourself. . . .
It affects me as painfully unedifying, and that compels
me to regard all agreeable or unembarrassed communi-
cations between us as impossible. I can neither suffer
you to come down to hear me utter those homely
truths, nor pretend at such a time to free or natural
discourse of other things on a basis of avoidance of
what must now be most to the front in your own
consciousness, or what in a very unwelcome fashion
disconcerts mine. Otherwise, " es ware so schon
gewesen ! " But I think you will understand, on a
moment's further reflection, that I can't write to you
otherwise than I do, or that I am very sorry indeed
to have to do it.

" Believe me, then, in very imperfect sympathy,

" Yours,

" Henry James."

I wrote, and he replied :

"... I am obliged to you for your letter of
Wednesday last, but, with all due consideration for it,
I do not see, I am bound to tell you, that it at all
invalidates my previous basis of expression to you. It
appeared from that . . . that the person best qualified
to measure the danger feared for your reputation, and
I really don't see how an old friend of yours could feel
or pronounce your being in a position to permit of
this anything but lamentable, lamentable, oh, lament-
able ! What sort of a friend is it that would say less ?
I wasn't for a moment pretending to characterize the
nature of the relations . . . that may conduce to
that possibility . . . but your position ! If I had to

p

i

The Flurried Years 89

speak of it again I am afraid I could only speak of it
as lamentable. ... I, however, deprecate the discus-
sion of private affairs of which I wish to hear nothing
whatever. And, neither knowing or willing to know
anything of the matter, it was exactly because I didn't
wish to that I found conversing with you at all to be
in prospect impossible. That was the light in which
I didn't — your term is harsh ! — forbid you my house ;
but deprecated the idea of what would otherwise have
been so interesting and welcome a tete-a-tete with you.
I am very sorry to have had to lose it, and I am yours
in regret,

" Henry James.

" November $th, 1909."

It was represented to him that he had more or less
put himself in the position of a judge, and vehemently
e disclaimed it. He didn't " for a moment pretend to
udge, qualify, or deal with any act of conduct of V. H.'s
n the connection, as a part, matter of . . . that whole
quantity being none of my business and destined to
remain so. ... I deplored or lamented the situation in
which you had landed or were going to land her. ... I
don't see how an old friend of hers can be indifferent to
that misfortune. ..."

" But these things surely are your own affair. ... I
wish you very heartily that your complications may work
out for you with some eventual ' Peace with honour.' "

Then I wrote to my dear Henry James passionately,
speaking for myself, declaring that, for my part, I wasn't
in a " lamentable position " at all. That I had nothing
to do but speak the truth and defend myself if what he
feared should come to pass. I said that I thought it
very hard that he should turn against me, and that,
though I was sorry I might not come to Lamb House, I
quite understood that it might be inconvenient and

go The Flurried Years

unpleasant to him to have me under his roof. I wanted
him to believe that I should listen humbly enough to
home truths from him if only a certain amount of the
sympathy on which I had learned to count was behind
it.

I assured him in plain language, using the stock,
stereotyped expression consecrated by long use, that I
was " innocent," and could not be dragged into anything,
and that, as for the other details, could he not, if he was
ever in the least interested in me, come and see me in
town and let me tell him how I stood. I impressed upon
him that he ought to count it to me that I had put him
in possession of certain facts, and could very easily have
paid my visit to Lamb House even at the risk of involving
him in a scandal and selfishly grabbed my pleasure at
the expense of his ease.

For one knew that the one thing Henry really dreaded
was being mixed up with life in any way, or entangled in
anything that went on outside the drawing-room door.
He was in no sense a man of the world. And, being what
he was, would it not have savoured of social meanness
if, through mere contact, I were to procure the soilure
of the white hem of Henry's robe of innocence ? And
there it should rest. If he, on his side, had not compassed
the man's virtue of being sans peur, I had acted accord-
ing to my own conscience and should retain the woman's
of being sans reproche, so far as he was concerned. So
that was that !

Christmas week was out. I had persuaded my friend
Alfred Mond, to buy the Review, and, because his political
views were so essentially different from those of the
editor, there was nothing left for him to do but politely to
relieve him of his task of editorship. The hurry of his
spirits at depriving a man of his ewe-lamb was such that
the kind Alfred ante-dated his letter by a year. The
editor, on the rack, graciously undertook, however, to

The Flurried Years 91

produce the February number for the new editor and
drill him in some of the practices which had made the
Review worth buying.

And we walked as usual in the Park, treading the dead
leaves like faded hopes under our feet, in silence. For a
week of mornings he did not address more than three
words to me.

Legal documents of all sorts, from all sorts of men
about all sorts of things, began to flutter on to our door-
mats and into our letter-boxes. " I canna tell a' ! I
canna tell a' ! " Everything damned at once, for me
and for him ! The Law, of which till then I had not the
slightest cognisance, for I came of decent people, loomed
enormous — Law, insinuating itself like malarial dust
into every simple-seeming detail of life — into the hall,
the parlour, even into my poor mother's sick-room.
Law can be forced upon the unheeding, as I came to
learn, just as you can be the prey of germs in the street
all unbeknown, and family law is the most insidious, the
most penetrating of germs, bitterest in the mouth of all.
I got sour and corrupted. Legal terms, as obscure
to me as logarithms, and as perplexing, ran off my
tongue. I became as inventive, as pettifogging as
a little country attorney — I who, when I was about
twenty-eight, having received my first cheque for my
" Autolycus " article in the Pall Mall Gazette, had marched
into the first bank I came to, somewhere near Trafalgar
Square, and asked them to cash it.

" Your own bank ? " the polite cashier insinuated.

" I have no bank," — and a long sigh. I kept that
cheque a week. It was not till I was paid for my second
novel that I opened an account with eighty pounds at
Barclay's Bank. Lord Kinnear, the dear old white-
haired gentleman who walked up and down past the
clerks behind their railings, treated me like a child, gave
me advice, and warned me against overdrawing.

92 The Flurried Years

Money — money — all money — repugnant to the roman-
tic mind ! Money per se meant nothing to me.
The spending of it came, as it does to us all, naturally,
without effort, and nothing became me in my life so well
as the losing of it, which I always did with the grace of
ignorance. And I always imagined that lawyers and
nice barristers, whom I danced with and met constantly
at dinners, were male Portias, doing things for nothing
and defending the helpless for the honour and glory of it.
But now I was beginning to see that money had always
meant everything — now as then. The editor had always
told me, as a result of his study of mediaeval documents,
that, in the days when knights were bold and ladies the
prize of the victor, the urge of money was even worse.
The wealth of Helen of Troy, as well as her beauty,
figures in the Iliad whenever she is mentioned. The
men who fought for the praise of ladies and their bright
eyes were the men who carried off rich women, im-
prisoned their mothers-in-law, and married other men's
widows for the beaux yeux of their cassette, and the coarse
phrasing used by the law in the dealings of married folk
merely masks a monetary claim. . . .

Christmas — and Elizabeth presented me with a large
slab of marzipan she had purchased for me, which I
refused to eat, being tired to death of the sight of her
domiciled at 84, as if for ever.

On Tuesday the nth of January, as I was innocently
going about my mother's business in my familiar shopping
centre of Kensington High Street, my eyes fell on the
legend set forth on a sandwich-board borne about by one
of the dowdy men walking in the gutter. It dissociated
itself at once from the other peripatetic advertisements
with which I was so familiar as never to cast an eye on.
It would be the Turkish Baths — at the corner where the
'buses stop ?

The Flurried Years 93

Mr. Hueffer to go back in Fourteen Days

I suppose most people are cognisant of the formula
used in Restitution Orders. I was not. I hadn't been
thinking of it very much, just then ; and, anyhow, I
had not expected it to come like that. I had been living
on a volcano, and had got used to it in so many ways,
resigning myself to a precarious existence on a slope,
amongst scoriae and brimstone from the crater whence
new trouble constantly belched — fires of hate and passion
from below, stoked by material greed. Money " work-
ing " still, a loathsome yeast at the very bottom of the
earth !

May, when I talked like this, always said that, for her
part, she'd rather take a bungalow on the edge of my
particular volcano than row in the same boat with more
knowing and cunning persons : sick she was " of the
world we lived in, of cowardice and hypocrisy, and

■ abominable, poisonous, sham morality."
Well, here it was, a fine overflow of lava for me. I
had never in my life been associated, so far as I knew,
with anyone who had ever " been in the papers."
Sheltered Victorian women were not exposed by their
men, much, to these things. . . . The immediate incidence
of that placard appalled me. The name of the man who
would ring the bell at my mother's house that very
evening and ask for me was being promenaded up and
down the street in capitals on a sandwich-board ! It
was a mercy that my niece had a cold and wasn't out
with me this morning, for, possibly, the malign thing
would have drawn its head in by the afternoon. Some
other scandal would have turned up, for they seem to
succeed each other on these posters like lightnings on a
screen. Somebody might murder somebody between
lunch and tea and engage the public's attention
effectively. . . .

94

The Flurried Years

My suffrage experiences should have rendered me
immune to the horrors of any sort of publicity, though
indeed, I do not find political publicity as irksome as
the other. And I had the same sensation of being
drowned, submerged under a tidal wave, that had come
over me in the passage of the Underground a year ago,
at the moment when, dropping the screen of my cloak,
I had whipped out my collecting-box and begun to beg.
That was an awful moment, but it was soon over. I had
had something to do, something to pull off. I had
rattled my box at the right people, and looked pathetic
at those whom the rattling would set against me, and
I had got as much money and a little more than any
other solicitants. That disgusting moment had had
its pleasant reward at least. After all, one cannot gain
anything without paying for it in some sort of sick
distaste and apprehension of possible failure. We all
fight, we humans, suffragettes and all, to provoke a
change — something better, or, if for nothing else, for
peace — " the central peace which subsists," so Words-
worth says, " at the heart of endless agitation." I
always wrote that quotation in the Suffrage Bazaar
copies of books one had to send.

And I suppose it did mean Peace. Something like
it — of the nature of the " gauntlet with the gift in it,"
Mrs. Browning's phrase for the dispensations of a capri-
cious fate. This was the blow of the gauntlet ; what
would the gift be? I set my lips and walked home,
wondering how I would face my mother's servants ?
The maid who would let in the man whose name was
" up," as she put it, all along Kensington High Street,
the cook who would cook our dinner that very night ! . . .

But I needn't have worried myself. He did not come
up to see me that evening at all or for many evenings
after that — too shy. I didn't wonder. Just imagine
Conrad or Henry James in the same case? . . . But,

The Flurried Years 95

I know them, they would never have permitted themselves
to come within a hundred miles of such a quandary, not
for fame or love or money !

And indeed that night if he had come, I was in the
mood to say to him :

" Why not go back and have done with it ? " For
Peace — a dreary sort of peace would certainly come to
him that way. The peace of Renunciation that he
was so good at. The " stupid, but exceedingly patient
donkey " — his father's phrase that rankled, always. . . .

Time passed . . . months . . . well into May-time ! No
stones — weighty — not even a pebble — dropped into the
silent pool of our fates. A conspiracy of silence ! I went
to many parties and the Beauty liked them. She missed
the editor, willing, it would seem, to see us less often . . .
rage, shamefacedness, what do I know? He plugged away
at his Review, put more money into it, nearly ruined
himself over it, made it into a company . . . He also,
seemed to have joined the conspiracy of silence, so that
I never, to this day, knew how he was taking it. He could
easily have said " I told you so." He had been right
last year at Charing Cross Station. . . . Anyway, true to
his philosophy of laisser-faire, laisser-aller , do what you
want and (let the other people) take what you get for
it, he went on doggedly editing very well — my stuff
too, for I had a serial running in the Review.

I suppose that in his so very recondite heart of hearts
he knew he had muffed it. Self-deception as usual —
the want of that form of imagination which is called
sympathetic — the Shelleyan type of mind that scorns
to drill itself into calculating its effects on other people
and to take their mentality into account and realise
that in the end, the mighty subliminal consciousness
that secretly sways us, has its will. People say one
thing, mean another, and do a third.

96 The Flurried Years

I rang up my solicitor but the dear man was vague
about everything. It is a way nice solicitors who love
you have when things are going to be awkward in all
sorts of legal ways. The " best laid schemes of mice and
men ! . . . " Probably to a male questioner he would
have been more explicit. We women had not got the
Vote as yet and men still snubbed us, kept us uninformed,
while spending our money

I am apt to fight a losing game for all I am worth and
lose it gaily, quoting to myself the funny parody of
Christina Rossetti written by a Cambridge undergrad :

Those who ask shan't have.
Those who don't, don't want,
I'll have it !
You shan't I

I always do ask. Sometimes I get it, but when I don't,
pessimistically I sing a song of George Macdonald's :

Alas, how easily things go wrong I

A sigh too much or a kiss too long,

And there comes a mist and a weeping rain,

And life is never the same again I

No, it never would be ; and with the mist and the
weeping rain came a shower of Summonses, Petitions and
Affidavits. I wonder how many times this year on my
way to reception or tea party I " smacked calfskin " —
held up my hand with a funny little book in it that might
have been a Nelson classic for all I knew — and swore,
mumbling, after the Commissioner for Oaths, that what
had been said and written for me was the truth
and nothing but the truth . . . ?

I seemed to have drawn a blank ... in happiness.
No Rewards and Fairies for me, no hope of the romantic
millennium of which I had dreamed, of sentimental and
satisfactory adjustments of joy or at least, amenity all
round, that many indications had led me to hope. I
suppose I don't know human nature, no novelist does.

The Flurried Years 97

We are all altruistic, of necessity, or we couldn't begin
to write novels that might hope to please.

For me it seems the wheel of fate had not been even
jogged. Complete stagnation ! I felt like an aeronaut in
a pocket — " stymied " in the air, I who like movement,
even painful movement when every step hurts. To draw
each breath in pain is better than being dead. If I could
avoid the pangs of acute rheumatism by entire quiescence
I should not lie still. . . .

And distinct damage had perhaps been done, losses
incurred in my mad bid for my little millennium. In
reaching out for one sort of happiness I had, may be,
dropped that which I held. All that month I moved about
dreading, yet daring, the moral shoot of anguish that I
might very likely suffer through disobedience to advice
in the past. Next to one other person I loved the Beauty
better than anyone else in the world and she might be
taken from me now. Yes, " The Crowned Caprice that
rules the world " might play with me soon !

The immediate outcome of it all for the present seemed
to be for the editor ten days in Brixton Gaol. There
was something to pay, and he would have paid it, only
that a sort of fanciful coup suggested itself to him. He
conceived a plan such as would naturally occur to a
romanticist, and commended itself to a reader of Grimm
like me, entailing the use of the word prison instead of
gaol, and durance vile for a fair lady — Rudel and the
Lady of Tripoli, or Leonora. He would do it. It might
bring about a change of heart, and so compass his desire.
He refused to plead poverty and let the law take its
course. I secretly believe he longed for the experience,
and felt that, buoyed up by hope and greed of copy,
he would be none the worse for prison fare and plank
bed.

He had now become my mother's " P. G.," and lived
in our house, paying her £3 a week, ample in those days,

Gy

98 The Flurried Years

where I could look after him as well as the niece. Number
84 was partially dismantled, and one room given up to
Mr. Byles, who was playing at being a literary agent
there. During the editor's absence Mary Martindale
and I, on his behalf, sold most of the library, spending
long days hunting up and returning first volumes of
valuable works to their owners. I still possess the first
volume of a book of William Rossetti's, which got
forgotten.

And one morning I packed a bag for .the editor to
take along with him to Marylebone Police Court. His
further destination was a foregone conclusion.

Setting him down in a neighbouring slum, so as to
preserve appearances — I never forgot I was a chaperon —
I bade him farewell for as long a term as His Majesty's
officers of the law should decree. " I don't plead
poverty ! " His contumacy, of the nature of a parti
pris, was naturally not understanded of the people !

My mother, the Beauty, and the servants at home were
under the impression that he was going down to stay with
a friend in the country, and I did not see him again until
he had been in prison for four days, and had written
me one letter to my three. Innocent ! I had sent
him the daily paper every day.

His friends took it all as a joke. Ezra Pound, from
Lago di Garda, called him the Apostle in Bonds, and
perpetrated shocking parodies on the comic event in the
style of " The Ballad of Reading Gaol."

Luckily this tactical error was not repeated. The
sum for which he was " quodded " was paid all right
in the end and after that he kicked no more at the
pricks and forked out like a man. And he got " the
experience " all right. During the daily prison walk
he had contrived to converse with Those Charming
People, expert burglars, fraudulent clerks, and stout-
hearted business men who, refusing to pay their rates,

The Flurried Years 99

compassed a rest cure, found themselves able to obey
their doctor's orders re smoking and drinking, and,
moreover, got off paying the sum for which they suffered
since it appears that a man cannot be tried again for
the same offence.

I went to see him without Order of Release or
collie-dog like the lady in Millais's picture, but shy and
nervous, escorted by the faithful Rene Byles. I was
inducted into a place that looked like a stable with a
manger, where there was, however, no straw or refuse.
I waited in front of a window with a pane not of glass
but such stuff as meat-safes are made of, and presently a
queer, grimacing figure surged up behind it and spoke
to me in a voice strangely unlike the editor's own.
He was a little hysterical but making the best of it.
In ten minutes he told me what he had to eat, what
he did all day — which was nothing — and how he had
contrived to get the warder, sent in to show him how
to make his bed, to make it for him on the plea of
writer's cramp and general incompetency; of the one
book from the prison library that had been doled out
to him to read : " A Story for Girls," by Mrs. L. T.
Meade, and his deprivation of half an hour of his
promen-ade because, being a Catholic, he had to take
that out in going to chapel.

And on Saturday, because next day was Sunday, two
days of his sentence were commuted and he came out.
Mr. Byles and I took him to The Continental near
Victoria, and made him who had barely eaten for a
week, " get outside " a beefsteak. He had the usual
complaints to make of prison fare — shocking stews, high
meat, four little brown loaves of bread a day, which he
could not touch because they were wet in the middle,
and gruel. I treasured up these details because if,
some day, I was sent to prison as a suffragette, this was
what I should have to eat. He handed me a piece of

ioo The Flurried Years

wax, a needleful of pack-thread and a small tab of sack-
ing. He had been making post-bags. I treasured this,
too. And when we got home my maid unpacked his
bag, and marvelled at his socks, three pairs sewn up into
tight balls. I said I supposed that the children in the
house where he had been staying had been having a
game with them. When I questioned him he told me that,
bored with Mrs. Meade's book, he had tried to relieve the
tedium by practising the Cinque valli " touch," en-
deavouring to keep the three woollen billiard balls going
off his back and arms at the same time.

Then, when I thought he could bear it, I gave him
some heavy news from Germany. Two days ago his
Aunt Laura had died. She was his very rich aunt.
Her will, altered an hour before her death, made her
so well-rubbed-in, thumping legacy to her nephew doubtful
till January, 191 1, and contingent on his good behaviour.
So, through her sudden death — she had had a shock,
news from England, on dits about her favourite nephew —
he had lost quite a lot of money in hand and his
children's future. His judgement was slightly distorted
by the illness consequent on a week's starvation —
for how could he eat the things he was given to eat ?
And he could not get rid of the idea that what had killed
Tante Laura was hearing that he was " doing time."
That, as a matter of dates, seemed possible ; after all,
as he said, you can get to Miinster in Westphalia in
less than twenty-four hours, and she had died two days
after he had been gaoled. His Majesty's four loaves of
" sad " baked bread a day had made the prisoner ill,
not because he ate them, but because he didn't, and there
was little else " to follow," as we say in the world of
freedom.

The May number was out, and Hermosa was left
in charge, as usual, of the Review, and we — my mother
and Elizabeth, whom I found I could tolerate because

The Flurried Years 101

she was going back to Konigsberg, nor did I grudge her
her solatium — went to a place that he knew of — the scene
of one of his books. Fordingbridge is a dull, quiet
village set in flat green meadows cut up with dykes and
ditches, so that when you drove, what with crossing and
re-crossing these little runlets, the dogcart seemed to be
going round and round like a kitten after its own tail.
We were within a drive of Salisbury and Wylie and Long-
ford and Winterbourne Stoke where he had lived in
early days. The Bell Inn was all right.

We would walk in the dusk up the great ridge from the
old house at the far end of Chicklade Bottom, and up the
long hill to Stockton Wood, to listen for the nightingales.
We hoped to track down the mysterious Mr. Hudson and
bring him out of his lonely cache to make merry with us.
What a fine motive it was for walks ! It was the Hudson
country — the wild, lonely Argentine had made it his own,
and we never drove through Marten or Broad Chalke
without feeling that he was watching us pass in our
dogcart, peeping from behind the drawn blinds of some
rough peasant's cottage in which he would have taken
up his abode in quest of intimate details of the habits of
swallows and solution of the mystery of the laying of
the cuckoo's eggs. But this time we did not meet him,
although he afterwards told me that he had been actually
living in Marten on the day we drove through. At
Fordingbridge I heard, for the first time, the crude, harsh
shout of the nightingale, for all the world like the wail of
a beggar's baby abandoned under a hedge. I told the
naturalist about that long afterwards, and he related to
me the story of Procne and the slain child, saying that
what I had heard was surely the cry of Philomela :
" Swallow, my sister, O sister swallow. ..."

The editor bought a kodak, and snapped me and the
cart and the monuments. Every morning we went to
the local chemist and paid for some blackened sheets of

I

102 The Flurried Years

gelatine paper that represented his efforts of yesterday.
Our landlady, with the scriptural name of Abi, used to
wonder why I treasured them.

It was also the country of the novel he was writing. I
found a title for it in Milton :

With store of ladies, whose bright eyes
Rain influence and judge the prize I

And I found in a tablet in the porch of Salisbury Cathedral
a name for the heroine. The Lady Dionissia de Egerton
de Tamville was a portrait of the Beauty at home —
pining — calling for me to come back and chaperon her
to balls.

It was done, and we returned to the orders and
summonses and bailiffs, of which I was getting my share.
For as early as February I was right up against the
family. There had been murmurings even from the
farthest North. My nicest sister, backed up by our Aunt
Jane, was getting nervous. The ball of family sedition
was set rolling by this pious lady. " And she who meant
no mischief, made it all " — Aunt Jane, my mother's
youngest sister, who had been the beauty of the family
in her day, backed up by her godchild, whom I will call
Goneril, the youngest and best-looking of ours !

My mother made Aunt Jane a yearly allowance —
practically kept her out of her own earnings as a novelist
in the seventies. She made it a principle not to spend my
father's money on any but his own family. My mother's
cheque went regularly to her every three months, signed,
dated, and enclosed with a kind letter in her own large,
clear handwriting. She had held a pen for many hours a
day since she was eighteen, and she was now eighty. But
Aunt Jane got a " scunner." Was her sister's money
being as carefully husbanded as it ought to be ? Aunt
Jane had heard tell of expensive Morris papers at six
shillings a yard being put even on to the walls of the

The Flurried Years 103

upstairs rooms — she naturally did not see why, now that
there were so many pretty, cheap papers, my mother
should persist in getting up her house Pre-Raphaelite —
and of slight additions from time to time . . . and,
though it was only a bathroom, it was all the same an
addition to my property. Aunt Jane did not think that
I ought to "beautify my own property at the expense of
my mother's income " and those who had a right to
expect to inherit from her. " Beautify " was perhaps a
funny word to use about such a necessary improvement,
and one which Dr. Barton had ordered, too ! Later on,
which added to her chagrin, she heard of a sort of pantry
or cloakroom added on to the ground floor, at my own cost.
But she was not apprised of that. Perhaps I never cared
to impart the knowledge. I was proud, and disdained to
justify my conduct of household operations to people
whom it did not immediately concern. I expected my
mother to live to ninety, like her grandfather, the trucu-
lent vicar and land agent, for he doubled those parts and
made history in Gainford.

And even Goneril, who possessed great rectitude when
it was not obscured by passion, admitted that " I had all
the trouble of Mamma ! " But now, this man . . . about
the house ... an author . . . one of " Violet's queer
fishes," like that editor of the Pall Mall Gazette she
brought North to stay with her godfather the Canon
once. . . .

Goneril was the mother of the Beauty whom I took
out, and in her fastness of Gateshead Aunt Jane had
heard that I led a very giddy and godless life in London
among all these artistic people. She did not at all approve
of the Beauty's being allowed to visit me perpetually,
practically to live with me and go about among them.
I was no sort of lion to walk beside a beautiful, innocent
Una, who loved me nearly as much as she loved her own
mother.

104 The Flurried Years

Dear little Goneril, how I loved her ! Shrewd and
weak, kind and capricious, cunning and silly, and very
lovely, like a Gian Bellini, with deep-blue, sombre eyes
that held out the message — alas ! of but a small soul,
askew, discomfited, and tortured — all about nothing !
I explained to her that, as they had all of them gone
and got married, leaving me, a bewildered, bemused
authoress, to cope with the problems of the happy ending
of the days of an old lady of eighty, they must really be
more patient, for this difficult job nearly always falls
to the spinster daughter, and, if she is decent, as I hoped
I was, she is glad to undertake it. But that they should
remember that it is not so nice to look after an old
woman as a nice man, who may look after you !

I do think that the position of such a one requires
special protection. Unpaid nurse and caretaker, she
can so easily do something to get herself called a rogue,
and be proceeded against on some pretext or other, and,
if she happens to have money of her own, may end in
losing it all.

For the last month or so it had been sought to obtain
powers to restrain me from perpetrating the particular
kind of villainy to which the position of unofficial guardian
renders liable nurses, companions, doctors even. Goneril
was torn between her allegiance to me, the difficulty of
co-relating the gossip she heard with known fact, and her
imperfect comprehension of the various points at issue.
I think it worried her into her grave. But Aunt Jane
flourished on it, and I had the benefit of her prayers till
1920.

During this dreary acreage of time, big with menace,
fraught with ominous trifles, there were " moments,"
satisfactions — sops to one's vanity, if nothing else. I
went to stay at Smeeth, and my host gave me a message
from Mr. Conrad — ill in bed — to the effect that he was

The Flurried Years 105

grateful to me for " being so good to his friend." The
editor, still smarting, for me, from Mr. James's laches,
was not particularly pleased to hear it and wrote quite
sarcastically of a letter he had himself just received
from his hero, blessing him in his incomings and outgoings,
but "in a circumscribed sort of way ; the outcome, as
you may imagine, of a Polish Jew, plus lower-middle-
class British Puritanism." Comic, the association of
Conrad and the British middle class ! And was he a
Jew ? Oh, nonsense ! The editor was dyspeptic or
riding one of his high horses that day. " It pleases me to
bring these people to their knees. 'Enery will be the
next, you will see."

And he was.

For that little rixe of last year was really all 'Enery's
old-maidishness of spirit. He was like the ladies of
Cranford, providing themselves with umbrellas and
goloshes for fear of a possible downpour ; clogs, lest they
stepped into little pools of passion, dreading such effects of
emotion as might subsist outside the four walls of a
drawing-room and are not properly announced by the
butler. He always, from that time, called me the
" Purple Patch," and in 1913 he told me to " go on being
one " and giving him teas at my club.

Later, ashamed of what I will call his inburst, he
confessed to Mrs. P. that he " had simply kept out
of it because I am too old to be mixed up in messes."
He kept out of mischief by not getting into it, as old Mrs.
Frank Hill used to say. The one bright spot, Mrs. P.
said, seemed to have been that I had written and warned
him that there might be a slight atmosphere of mess
about me. There were several counts on which my
presence in court might have been required. Supposing
I had " called " him ! 'Enery would have died. America
would have squirmed. No, I would not bring whatever it
was into the house, as one says of scarlet fever or measles.

106 The Flurried Years

And he had dilated to Mrs. P. on Mary Martindale, her
charm, her beauty, which gave me something nice to tell
Mary, for she was always too humble. She knew 'Enery
very well. He had always admired her.

He had been ill again, and I had written to enquire.
He replied. I was " Dear Violet " again !

" Lamb House,

" February 14th, 1910.
"... Don't measure my extreme appreciation of
your most kind letter by this delay, or by these
informal, invalidical signs. I have had to wait to be
able to form the latter at all presentably — after a
dreary little relapse, from which I am again picking up ;
and my letters have to be rare and feeble scrawls of
which this is a pattern. It was a charming charity in
you to write, and everything you tell me a breath of
your roaring London world (gracefully and consider-
ately bedimmed a little), wafted into a sick-room that
at the end of six or seven weeks has become dismally
tedious. I have turned the corner (round which con-
valescence has kept tantalisingly hiding and staying ;
I'm after it — or close on its heels probably now.) I
am mostly sitting up without the prospect of tumbling
back into the sheets of platitude. And I rejoice in
your brave account of your own heroisms. They come
to me like vague, confused strains and boom-booms of
a Wagner opera — that there are women of confirmed
genius who take ravenous nieces to London balls ; I
mean for the incredible Valkyrie air of Gotter-
ddmmerung of it. Mrs. Clifford tells me you have
written — just published — something very strange and
fine and fierce somewhere ; would it overtax the
shaken nerves of your enfeebled yet unconquered and
all-faithful old

" Henry James."

The Flurried Years 107

I gave a series of " afternoons." They always amused
my mother and were within her competence. As I was
fastening the last hook of the Beauty's frock upstairs
I heard the voice of the editor, who was like a child
before a party, looking out of the window on the stairs
into the porch. It expressed the deepest satisfaction,
as if all was well in the best of all possible worlds :

'* Here's James ! "

Soon, settled in for the afternoon, surrounded by
adoring ladies, the recluse of Rye sat complacent, holding
my last new Persian kitten between his open palms,
talking animatedly to the Beauty, who could not talk
but looked. He quite forgot the poor beast, which was too
polite and too squeezed between the upper and the
nether millstone of the great man's hands, to remind him
of its existence, and I dared not rescue it until the
sentence on which Mr. James was engaged was brought
to a close — inside of half an hour.

Everybody came to me. I suppose it was the Beauty's
spell. Her photograph adorned Henry James's mantel-
piece at Rye for long after. We rented a big garden
opposite, long since built over, and we gave parties
in it. At one of these I had the felicity of introducing
Miss Christabel Pankhurst to Mrs. Humphry Ward,
the darling Die-hard of the opposition. The Queen
of our Cause was anxious to see if she could " get over
her," with her puissant charm that so seldom failed.
Dear, kind Mrs. Ward, to please me, consented, on
the condition that Christabel did not tackle her on
the subject of politics. That is how I diplomatically put
it to Christabel, and she agreed to be good, but I was
afraid of the sheaf of convincing pamphlets she always
carried about with her on chance. She refused to lay
them down— there was nowhere to lay them — but she
was a woman of her word and all the while she was
talking to Mrs. Ward I noticed her hands, that grasped

108 The Flurried Years

the papers folded behind her, quivering with the effort
of repression.

We had tennis in the garden nearly every afternoon
while my mother, in the white Chuddah shawl that is
the uniform of old-ladyhood, looked on at a foursome,
say, between Mr. Hugh Walpole and Ezra Pound and
two beauties, Amber Reeves and Kitty Rome. The young
American poet played like a demon or a trick pony,
sitting down composedly in his square and jumping up
in time to receive his adversary's ball, which he
competently returned, the flaps of his polychrome shirt
flying out like the petals of some flower and his red head
hke a naming pistil in the middle of it. Ezra, a dear, lived
near us, and was in and out all day. He was very kind
to the editor, and would do any sort of job for him or
me, using up his intense and feverish energy in taking
down winged words at dictation, or tying up my creeper
for me. He would wear my Connemara cloak or the
editor's old Rossetti coat — any old covering — with
serenity. Wonderful young ambitious poets of his trempe,
confirmed artists of all kinds, mingled in our courts with
the wistful Walter De La Mare and the spanking Amy
Lowell, the sinister but delightful Madame Strindberg
with her marmosets, painters like Jacob Epstein and
Wyndham Lewis and Richard Nevinson and Gaudier
Brjeska. The portrait of Ezra Pound in stone by this
young Frenchman still decorates my front garden, and
is actually supposed to have guaranteed my immunity
from German bombs during the raids. It, on the other
hand, by some of the residents in that quarter, was
supposed to represent a German cache for papers. I let
them rave. It does look ghastly and terrible when the
moon shines out, but it has not saved me from
burglars.

Henri Gaudier Brjeska was quiet, ill-looking, almost
toothless, wearing his blue workman's shirt, clean, on all

The Flurried Years 109

occasions. He was a Frenchman, and liable for military
service in France. They could not get him here, but,
inspired by patriotism, he was always offering himself.
At last he crossed over, and, without waiting to take
his luggage out of the Custom-house, went straight to the
authorities. They actually arrested him as a deserter,
sent him under guard to Dieppe, and put him into an
empty cottage, garde d vue, for the night. He escaped
easily, and, returning on foot to Calais, by a lucky fluke
got his luggage out of the Customs and returned to
England again. He tried again, and this time they
accepted him, and the Germans killed him at Neuville
St. Vaast.

We were full of animals at home : the young owl,
Ann Veronica, bought in Covent Garden market in the
wrong month — an illicit purchase ; the bulldog, given to
me sooner than shut him up because he worried sheep ;
nine Persian cats and two parrots — -one that I went to
Charing Cross and fetched on receipt of a telegram —
" Will you have the parrot or shall I kill him ? " — and
another with only one eye that we bought from the public
house next door to save him from ill-treatment.

The shy Mr. Hudson came now and then, I veritably
believe just to see Ann Veronica. He wanted her to be
let fly, and I promised as soon as she was a little older,
although she had a cage as big as a south coast railway-
carriage, through whose mesh the white owls of Holland
Park, visiting Ann, used to drop odd pieces of flesh as a
present to her, for she was a very pretty little owl. She
died untimely. Someone, certainly not a Holland Park
owl — I do not lay it to them — gave her a breast of grouse,
and the bone choked her. There was no sign of distress —
but she would not eat. The vet. fetched a mouse — I
turned away when it was put into the cage — but a minute
later, when I turned round again, the mouse was sitting
between the feet of the owl, peeping out, a black nozzle

no The Flurried Years

from the brownness of her feathers. Mr. Hudson was
good enough to forgive me. It was, I fancy, not easy for
him. But would not the other owls have torn her instead
of loving her, if she had been out and about, questing,
competing with them in the search for food ?

Cubes, pets, protegees, dinners, and dances, the latest
in everything ; clothes, books, plays, pictures, and
ideas ! Yet, Ach, du lieber Augustin — Augustin —
Augustin ! Alles ist hin, as we used to sing light-
heartedly when we were children, waking possibly the
saddest echoes in the grown-up hearts of parents and
nurses even, as they danced en ronde with us.

All such things touch secret strings
For heavy hearts to hear.

Alles ist hin ! It seemed to be. We were poised on the
point of a needle, trembling in space, and all this remue-
m'enage, this nervous gaiety, this singing of German Lieder
and performing of amateur plays at the Cabaret Club
under the walls covered with Wyndham Lewis's raw
meat designs, this crackling of thorns under the social pot
was all very well, but it wasn't life, either of the heart or
the mind. Dressing for dinners and lunches, cabbing
thereto, lying awake from excess of fatigue ... I longed
to get out of this pretty, tinkling, vapid prison-palace and
plunge for the last time into an Odyssey-like adventure
that might ultimately end in the peace of ancestral
halls. Peace, too, in my heart, or what passes for my
heart, which the illuminating flash of a few months
ago had shown me was not dead, but still susceptible
of pity and terror, which is tragedy and life.

And something did happen ; the devil's cauldron that
had been preparing succulent sorrows for me ever since
1908 boiled up. . . . Something that would hinder me

The Flurried Years in

of my prospective freedom and import stern considera-
tions of duty into my life for a term of years, short or
long. The Beauty, my innocent little adherent, was
swept off in the rushing flood of calumny, removed lest
she should be involved in " the sorry scheme of things,"
and, all unconscious, was paying her last visit to me, at
least during her grandmother's lifetime.

Her grandmother's condition was parlous, not as
regarded her health, fair for a woman of eighty — " a
little chronic heart-disease," that was all. My mother,
the friend of Robert Browning, of all the Rossettis, of
Ruskin and Ford Madox Brown, who was, as a young girl,
the toast of the county, one of the wittiest women of
her time, had, since my father's death, gradually gone
tiresome, peevish, melancholy, irresponsible, " dothery "
as she herself called it in her North Country speech.
Yet she still had wonderful moments, when the poor
last sum of her excellence would flash out in little stars
of wit or bursts of staggering dialectic that were startling,
and disturbing, but always tempered and annealed by
emulcents from the deep well of tenderness that was
her heart.

She had the meed of her sometimes astonishing frank-
ness ; she was a wonderful talker. And Arnold Bennett
used to like to listen to her much better than talking to
me or the Beauty. She and I used to sit neglected in a
corner of the room playing spelicans, while my mother
scintillated, destroying reputations — of a hundred years
ago, Men entendu— with a single word, and as suddenly
building them up again by a favourable anecdote,
summoning up the past, the glories of the fifties in London
or the vagaries of members of the old northern stock of
which she came.

Her memory for old times was vivid, but it failed
almost entirely to recall the minor happenings of the day
before yesterday. She had one " phobia " by now — only

ii2 The Flurried Years

one — the mania of approaching destitution, the dread of
dwindling dividends which comes on people who in their
day of power and strength have been " careful," who, all
their lives, have husbanded their resources and saved
their money for the good of those that are to come after
them — not a modern trait ! Her business instinct, once
so strong, was necessarily in abeyance but, in her own
phrase, it was " at the back of what I am pleased to call
my mind," and she was as chary of " parting " as the
most grudging of guardians could have wished. I would
have to stand over her for half an hour to get her to sign
a modest cheque for the butcher.

Her pass-book, which she needed not to consult, since
her day of investment was over, reposed safely in the
ward of her bank-manager. She banked in Durham.
Now and then her lawyer, Mr. " Augusta " Webster,
husband of the famous poetess, Mrs. Augusta Webster —
would come to see her, and the maid was handed the key
of the safe and papers were brought up on the kitchen
tray. I was not present — Mr. Webster would not permit
that — so I never knew what she was after, little generosi-
ties to us children, done on the sly mostly. As a matter
of fact, her largesses to me made trouble for me after she
was dead. From her desk, where she kept her stamp
collection carefully locked, she would sometimes take out
and show me a large envelope on which was written in
red ink, Our Grave. It had been purchased for my father
sixteen years before, and it was to be got out again in
1912. I had not thought it would have been so soon.

In her wardrobe was a parcel containing a smart
nightgown and a pair of stockings for her to be buried
in without which she never travelled. Sometimes she
showed it to me. These demonstrations signified,
peeping out, that quality in her — the northern, Valkyrie-
like hardness and grimness that interested Mr. Bennett.
Her wonderful figure and her beautiful hair, that D. G.

MY MOTHER

/.. 11-

The Flurried Years 113

Rossetti had so admired, constituted her best claim to
looks, and a plateful of grey, not brown, plaits wreathed
her head on the day she lay in her coffin. She had
published over a dozen novels, and had been well paid
for them, and had been on the staff of the Athencsum
under Norman McColl, and of the Spectator under Hutton
and Townsend.

This woman of parts, her mentality obscured merely
by the natural incidence of age, it was now sought to
restrain ; in so many words — put into a cheap asylum.
I contested the absurd proposition tooth and nail, but
like the kid of Monsieur Seguin who " fought the wolf
all night and in the morning he ate her." . . . My puny
resistance — as strong as I could make it — was overcome.

I was alone to fight them. J. L. F. M. H., or Joseph
Leopold, as I had taken to calling him, since that strange
official christening at Brixton, was absorbed in his own
worries and complications. He was no manner of use.
Indeed, when he had time to think about it, he desired
me, for my own comfort and his, to desert, to take my
hand off the helm of my mother's affairs and leave her
and her lawyers and the family to do for her and with
her what they would.

What they would ! I could not leave her to that fate.
And my Fiduciary Position that they had forced on me was
becoming too harassing for words ; the hints, the accusa-
tions of peculation, of intimidation were ridiculous, but
they hurt. I came to consider a certain concession that
our dear old family doctor was advising me to make in
order that my mother might remain under my charge
and Goneril, under the rose, and unbeknown to Aunt
Jane, was seconding him.

What the doctor wished was for me to help him to

keep the matter in his own sympathetic hands, and press

him to certify my mother to be, from loss of memory,

incapable of managing her own affairs, and to suggest
Hy

ii4 The Flurried Years

that her daughter, who had never left her for more than
a month together, was the proper person to take care of
her as receiver of her estate under the Court of Lunacy.

I had, in my selfish heyday, ever so little neglected her.
I resolved to make up for it now. I would obey the
doctor and beg to be so appointed, and, as I under-
stood, make the sacrifice of my own liberty. For of
course I could not go and live anywhere else. I must be
more or less to hand, there to receive the visits of fine
gentlemen, frock-coated sons of Peers coming at nine
o'clock in the morning, or earlier, to catch me napping
and find out whether I kept my mother clean.

A nurse must be got, and I myself must be certified
by a couple of respectable persons of character as compe-
tent and kind — it runs somewhat like that — and of good
report in the neighbourhood in which I lived. I appealed
to two unprejudiced witnesses, that is to say, not special
friends of my own, to an old college friend of my father's,
and with him Honorary Fellow of Corpus, Lord Courtney
of Penwith, and to Mr. William Alexander of Aubrey
House, where my sisters and I had played in rooms
decorated by Whistler in pale, pure colours, a decorative
scheme originally meant for Mr. Leyland's Peacock
Room.

And, so true it is that we tend to become what the
people around us would have us be, that my mother
complied with her keepers, and changed from that
moment, beginning to play the part assigned to her by
the regents of her destiny — gentle, amiable, pleasantly
wool-gathering and physically incompetent and useless.
I mean that she never again lifted a finger to help herself,
put on a shoe, or plait her own hair. She ceased to write
or type or copy out my manuscripts for me, as she had
been doing, or play various patiences in ways invented
by herself. No more roaming about the house or interfer-
ing with her own servants. The nice nurse mastered

The Flurried Years 115

her. She stayed quietly in her own " apartments," and
looked out of the window at the garden she would never
tend again. In short, she began to die — the Hades-like
death we decree for those whom we have feared and
loved, the exercise of whose volition has proved a little
troublesome to us, who are still in the swim. She had
not a penny of her own, or a purse to put one in, not a
postage stamp ; everything she had was held by the
Court for her children. She had been over-generous, in
truth, but it was her own considerable earnings from
literary sources that she had made free with.

She entered, as the French say, en agonie — into " The
Time " that her friend John Ruskin had spoken of :
" A time, short in happy lives — but — always a Time."

1910

Fate's Finger Points to Germany ? — A Useful Holiday — The Mystery of
Aunt Laura's Will — / write to The Countess — The Rhine Boat — Pax
Germanica — Goneril and Regan fade out — foseph Leopold's Relations — ■
Cousin Mimi on English Wild Women and German Divorce Law —
Aunt Emma desires him for the Fatherland — Family Title to be
Revived — The Power of Suggestion — Nauheim — The Tzar and Tzarina —
The Kaiser's Darling — The Countess's Counsel — Joseph Leopold to
Giessen — Rechtsanwalt John — The Great Resolve — Count von A schendorf
— Nationalisation — Aunt Emma's Joy — Wheels within Wheels —
Marburg and the Students — International Law — Ritler Olaf — " And
I too will have on my arm someone I like very much."

I was not yet in what lawyers call " the saddle." I
desired a last flutter, and — I suppose it was Fate — the
society of the little East Prussian Elizabeth and the
sudden tragic and unexplained seizure of Tante Laura,
the strong woman of the fifties, had given me to think,
and I was growing to have an obsession — to go to Ger-
many— of all dull places. It might have been a hunger
for the sight of decently, sensibly arranged German
things, German customs, German institutions, everything
but German cooking. The decor of Germany was to me
like the background of a fairy-tale — a familiar one of
Grimm's. The first child's book bought for me by my
mother was " Holy Grimm," as the little Burne- Jones
boy used to say.

My German nurse, Milly, from Paderborn, the home of
folk-lore and superstition, had for the time made me and
my sisters into such little Germans that it was found
useless to give us an order or scold us in any other
tongue. French nurses at eight years old made an end
of that, but I was ready to put out a very loving tentacle
to the land of the Frog Prince, Trusty Henry, Rose White

116

The Flurried Years 117

and Rose Red ; the Stork and the Almond Tree. More-
over, Germany was the country where, in the early
fifties, my father and mother, in their great need breaking
through the Victorian rule of chaperonage, both tempor-
arily emancipated from proprieties by their morbid fear
and apprehension of blindness, had escorted each other
across the Channel to claim the services of the old Eye
doctor who had trained Pagenstecher and Meurer, to
whom mamma had recommended Rossetti. The H of rath
De Leuw was grandfather to Mrs. Haydn Coffin. His
patients had colonised the village of Grafrath. George
du Maurier was one of them, and you will find a descrip-
tion of the little Klinik in The Martians.

And as for Joseph Leopold, there was his Uncle Friede-
rich at Warnford and his Aunt Antonia and his Aunt
Emma and his Cousin Mimi at Boppard on the Rhine, not
a stone's throw or a German lustige shout from the Lorelei
Rock that my father painted, not to speak of one hundred
and thirty nine Hueffers in the town of Miinster alone.

" Let's go to Germany for a holiday," I said, and Fate
with her finger on her lip, stood monitory — but let us go.

Why should we not beat up the German clans and find
out the mystery of Tante Laura's death, and all about
everything, before I was definitely tied to my mother's
ipron-strings ? — a sheep dog, liable to be called to heel
at any moment, sure to be sworn at should it venture to
move independently or fail to round up its sheep properly.
And, re Tante Laura's death, why should not Joseph
Leopold go and explain to his surviving aunt, her sister,
why he had been obliged by circumstances over which
he had not control to take no notice of it ? I am ashamed
to say that I was mercenary enough to remember that
there were only two shaky lives between him and a
fortune, and, anyway it would be a great adventure !

I didn't want to ask my mother to finance me, as usual,
on my holiday. No, not any more. I cast about, and,

n8 The Flurried Years

no advance on a new novel being available, I sold a
picture of my father's that my godfather had given me
years ago and that Ruskin had admired. It nearly broke
my heart to part with it, but at least it went to my
father's native town ; the Mayor and Corporation of
Liverpool purchased it of me for the local gallery. I got
a hundred and fifty pounds.

The hordes of ruffians that, on the declaration of war,
poured out of Germany appeared to most English people
to come from lands as far, as alien, as savage, as
Timbuctoo. More's the pity ! A greater inter-sympathy
might have averted it. A good friend of mine, a globe-
trotter, was living at Nauheim. She was a widow and at
a terrible loose end, and would, I fancied, easily be
persuaded to come and chaperon me. " That Freedom "
I had and had had always since I began to publish ;
" That Chaperonage " was now a great deal more im-
portant to me. Indeed, it was a sine qua non. One
little social slip, and for my mother the cheap asylum,
and for me everlasting remorse.

We would go down the Rhine in Hueffer-run boats from
Tilbury to Rotterdam, through Holland and Diisseldorf
and Cologne, past the Rhine castles, and on to Mainz
and Heidelberg, where the students fight. We would
sleep and eat on the boat, going on shore wherever we
stopped if it seemed good to us.

So it was settled, and the Countess was written to.
She agreed, delighted and would meet us at Tilbury. No
more unchaperoned would I be, however virtuous. I was
too old to be a New Woman. She was an ideal old lady.
She had neither temper nor temperament. No initiative,
like an easy-chair in the room. It would be a delightfully
lazy trip and soothe our nerves, all on edge since " Blood
upon the Buttercups." The boat would go very slowly ;
we would be sitting, reading, eating, talking, singing if

The Flurried Years 119

we chose, on the upper deck, looking down on the lower
where they would be loading and unloading cargo. We
should never know when or how long they were going to
stop, but we knew that we should spend a night moored
to the pier at Cologne. And we should get off for good
at Assmanshausen, where this good German — or was she
an Austrian ? — had engaged us rooms. Joseph Leopold
had written to the relations at Boppard and bidden them
wave a white tablecloth, just as Ruskin used to do for us
children when we were rowed across the lake from
Coniston to Brantwood.

There were amusing people on the boat, too. There
was a large mass of flaccid tenor who bore the name of
one of Europe's prime operatic favourites. He never
left the dining-room, but lay there covered in shawls,
as if he had been poured out, from meal to meal. Aubrey
Beardsley's lovely mother, all turquoises and lace, ran
about the decks and talked German. There was a nice
little band at one end of the upper deck. . . .

As we passed the Lorelei Rock all the Germans except
the tenor, who was Italian, and not on deck, broke into :
" Ich weiss nicht was soil es bedeuten ..." I was also
traurig, and a thought would not go out of my mind. . . .
I had had a letter from home.

Law — I won't call it justice exactly, but certainly
blind, like her — had taken the occasion of my absence
to smite a poor old woman of eighty to whom sorrow
had only left eyes to weep and to read with, and suscepti-
bilities frayed by years of use but still vivid enough to
be hurt. My maid had written to tell me that yesterday
my mother's lawyer had sent his chief clerk to South
Lodge with a summons. Mr. Lane had been chosen
probably because of his sympathy with my mother and
me and all those on whom, for one reason or another,
tribulation had found a billet. He was a man so kind
and understanding that when poor Wilde, another

120 The Flurried Years

on whom the hand of the law lay heavy, had been brought
up from Reading to appear re his bankruptcy, the
grateful poet had given him, in gratitude for his petits
soins, an original manuscript poem of two stanzas which
I had had the pleasure of selling for him to Robert
Ross, who collected, as everyone knows, any existing
scrap in this author's handwriting. It was this Mr.
Lane's duty to penetrate into my mother's chamber
and, in pursuance of it, rehearse to her a document which
informed her that she was " a person who, through
mental infirmity arising from age, was incapable of
managing her own affairs ..." and that if she objected
to such an order being made she must sign such objection
and file it at the office of Master Theobald within three
clear days at the Royal Courts of Justice.

Eighty years of age, and anxious to manage anything !
But dividends will come in and cheques will go out, and
wastage may go on for ever. . . . Presents she could
still give. . . . She must not. . . .

What a mockery ! For, supposing that the poor lady
did with all her heart desire to protest, how could she
have been certain of procuring the machinery to do so ?
Her rheumatic fingers could not hold a pen, and a nurse,
schooled by mail clad guardian angels, might refuse to
take a letter down at dictation. And where would be her
purse, unused for years, and would it have a stamp
in it and, even supposing she could have managed to
write and send such a letter to the proper quarter, would
it be accepted as against the opinion of the doctor who
certified her ?

Lane told me afterwards that never, in the whole
course of his engagement as clerk to my mother's
solicitors, had he performed any task so repugnant to
him. He said when he was introduced into the room as
a visitor he hardly dared to tell the calm, dignified,
clear-speaking old lady that she was a mad woman, for

The Flurried Years 121

that was what it practically amounted to ; that she had
listened patiently to his shamefaced mumbling of the
summons, and only said, when he had quite finished,
that there was a gentleman in the house whom she could
consult and would like to have come to her. She meant
Joseph Leopold, whom she was fond of because he had
" a voice like his grandfather." But he was at that
moment getting on to the Rhine boat at Rotterdam !
Then, as Mr. Lane said, evidently disappointed, she sat
still and made conversation with him instead of dismissing
him as he deserved to be dismissed. And the nurse
told me afterwards that my mother was really bitterly
offended and hurt all the time, and cried for three days,
reproaching her children and reviling them, as King
Lear reviled, but less gently, his Regan and Goneril. " And
Janev ! " she kept saying. She had not seen her sister
Jane for twenty years.

And that was what made me so piano going down in
the pleasure-boat, with the little orchestra at the prow
accompanying the Germans, who broke out into lusty
song, singing Der Wacht am Rhein as they went past
Duisberg and Diisseldorf and Crefeld. Factories with
their belching chimneys — all the material of wealth —
set down squat in level pastures where the placid, red-
backed cows stood knee deep in grass, pushing through
the reeds to drink. The colours of everything, since
Rotterdam, were not positively distasteful but raw and
strident, as they always are in Germany — like a Holman
Hunt picture. Nothing " pretty-pretty " anywhere.
The mentality of Germany always suggests to me a harsh
voice, a loud colour, a blatant gesture, a sentence spoken
in a bar or on a racecourse. But over all a peace, self-
evident, that does not by any means pass understanding,
for it is the peace of good sense and good digestion —
the lotus eaters, satiate with some sedative, as potent
and less poetical than the Hermes-gift of the herb moly !

122 The Flurried Years

The boat moved very slowly. With a Schleier over
my hair — for it is not considered decent for a Frau or a
Fraulein to uncover their heads out of the house — I sat
on the long slats that made the seat under the white
rim of the boat, and looked out and thought inward,
while Joseph Leopold played patience and conceived
romances. Floating along thus, we seemed a part of,
and made one with, this complacent, weighty and seriously
gliding vessel that was more like him than me. I saw
that the grind of our opposite temperaments, forced
together into the long, long fight that common existence
is, would produce its own peculiar form of erosion. Of
course we both had faults, each of us the one or two
skyscraping ones, but these, so far, were held in check —
kept well in hand in the gallant attempt to make a good
thing of it. We two — who were to " rule the world," in
lover's parlance — must do our best to make our own
corner of it healthy. I must manage to play up properly
to a genius, and, as a hardy motorist once said to me,
" not clutter up the brake ! " Good books were to be
written and money to be made — oh, the pity of it ! For
the urge of that necessary • materialism may be a spur
to talent but is death to genius, as I conceive of genius.
A wage-earner and father of a family must not waste
time over style, unless it comes naturally, or be cross
at luncheon because he has spent the whole morning in
finding le mot juste.

And character will peep in. I had not realised that
this particular genius liked everything arranged for him
except his recreations and expected, like the Psalmist
to have " his feet set in a large room," the desk of life
laid out for him with pen, papers and rubber bands and
all literary conveniences. So that, having made known
to an obedient family his determination not to be inter-
fered with, he could shut the door on writs and duns,
bores and viragos, refusing to be confronted with any

The Flurried Years 123

of the problems that beset an author unfortunately
doubled with a man. He refused absolutely with his
intellect to face them, preferring to oppose to adverse
circumstances the fleshy back that an Egyptian slave
might bend to the lash of an overseer. He would bear
quite meekly, like the " exceedingly patient donkey "
to which his father had compared him in boyhood, the
weals of fate, or, like a German of to-day, go about
his business quietly under the occupation of the
Ruhr.

But I am different. I won't bear things unless I have
to. I have to live always in the boiling middle of things
or, to mix metaphors, in a world of thin ice and broken
eggs that will never make an omelette. It seems to be my
fate always to be up against people who prefer solvency
to sentiment and pawkiness to passion. Despite my
fighting spirit, through prudent instincts transmitted
to me by the mother I have described, I make ridiculous
attempts to placate the powers, " going round behind "
as it is called, but quite boldly and above board, sitting
down on the hornet's nest, stealing into the camp of
the enemy, and offering desperate and romantic con-
cessions. It is never any good, but I have done it. It is
as if Don Juan were to go offering cups of tea to the
statue of the Comandante in order to persuade him not
to come down ! I was always one that, refusing to
notice when the signals were against me, made haste to
the rendezvous that is to bring down misfortune on my
head — vide Marie Louise of Prussia in her letter to
Napoleon.

But meantime the Rhine was very wonderful. It was
the first big river I had seen, and knocked our little
Thames ditch into smithereens. . . . We went ashore
at Cologne and dined, and I went to a beer-garden for
the first time, and drank, or pretended to drink, a tankard

124 The Flurried Years

of kleiner helles, while Joseph Leopold had three of grosser
dunkles. So on board again, and to bed.

At about seven next morning I woke, and heard the
clapotement of water as usual at the side of my narrow
bed. As we gently fared along, the white light of morning
came in at the little porthole window. I looked out.
Deep called to High, and no man saw but I, for all the
world was asleep except, presumably, the man at the
helm who was guiding this commercial craft along the
canon between two cliffs — the passage between Roland-
seek on one side and the Drachenfels on the other. The
delicate golden beams lit up a panorama which, like a
picture hung on a wall in a lonely gallery, seemed to have
been waiting all these years for my British eye to rest on.
For the Rhine is Germany's achievement, like a national
air or a national statue or a national Church builded of
her own masons. The Rhine is her national Aussicht, of
which the nation that put up the Germania in a moment
of artistic forgetfulness, has yet the gumption to be
proud. We went slowly between the cliffs, like walls
where green vines, closely packed, crawled up to summits
tipped with castles, hoary and brown, the robber strong-
holds of the dreadful past. The verdure slung like a
curtain down from the sky . . . like a hanging garden,
to the edge of the water that passed along evenly in pride
of power and strength, its dark flow delving into scarped
banks, its glancing ripples breaking up the level blackness
near the middle, where I was being borne along through
the gateway of Horn into the land of my dreams and
Pax Germanica. It all faded out — the stale horror, like
beer spilled on public house tables, of Aunt Jane, Regan
and Goneril, Brixton and Charing Cross, lawyer's clerks
and affidavits, and statements that seem to state nothing.

The relations did not hang out the table-cloth for the
very good reason that they had not been advised of our
arrival, but, as the boat swung round the curve of

The Flurried Years 125

Boppard, Joseph Leopold pointed out to me the little
villa and its garden, box-and-laurestinus-bordered, for
all the world like one in Addison Road or St. John's
Wood, where Aunt Emma lived, and Mimi her invalid
daughter and Carolina her cook. There was the usual
pleached walk along the shore where I should walk with
Mimi. There was one in every village we had passed,
but this was a very fine one.

We got ourselves out of the Freiligrath room into the
annexe and carried her with us. It was much nicer than
the old historic hotel. The annexe had clear, clean,
straight passages, a strip of matting in the middle,
into which fight, high rooms opened ; clear, pale, bed-
room china, the decorations sensible, chaste, appropriate,
with no old-fashioned nonsense about them — perhaps a
soupgon of art nouveau — and under one's large, gracious
windows all the time the ripple of the river, and on the
nether shore the ferryman in his boat, moored in mid-
stream. . . . The Island of the Bishop Hatto — where
the rats pursued the man who held the grain — created
the noise, for the Rhine is too majestic to ripple for
nothing, like our little parlour streams at home.

At night we wandered in the white road, all bordered
with vines and the slim, sliding rails, well lubricated,
that do not hinder the fox at his thievish work. " Take
us the little foxes — the little foxes that devour the
vines " Yes, we smelt them. . . .

There is room, or they make room, for a single line
on either side of the river. The object of this is of course
utilitarian, but the train, with its bulldog breast and
following of lighted carriages rattling by on the opposite
bank, reminds one less of modern civilisation than of
the Worm of German legend with his tail of gold. Behind
us are the woods of the Eiffel, one of the great silent
forests of Germany, birdless for lack of water, so desperate
their Noth that, like the deer and the wild boar, these little

126 The Flurried Years

creatures have to come for a drink all the way to the
river that is threading the woods of enchantment on its
way to touch at the noisy centres of commerce.

Terrible, unblest wildernesses, stretching back and
back, holding God knows what in their depth — witches,
robbers, and wild beasts. As you walk you can hear the
boughs cracking. But as for human beings, you can walk
all day without meeting a Forster, in his grey-green
clothes, or a charcoal burner, stooping over his fire that
reddens the boles of the big trees.

Next day I went, as suggested, by myself and called

on Frau Emma G and her daughter in the earwiggy

little villa half way up the hill. I rang the bell, and it was
answered by the spare, aged woman I had been told to
expect.

" 1st es Carolina ? " I murmured persuasively.

The gnddige Frau was indisposed, but the Fraulein
was in, and entertained me. I took her to tea at the
hotel as I had been told to do, for it would be a tremendous
jaunt for her. I found Mimi the most sentimental of the
sentimental, as charitable as it was possible to be. She
went once a week with a basket, covered with a white
cloth, containing delicacies for the sick poor of Boppard,
and once a week in the steamer as far as the Lorelei
Rock and back, and joined in the chorale, weeping and
feeling better when she came home. And so she did
when I told her of Joseph Leopold's illness, of my own,
and of the sorrows we had both undergone. I did not
tell her about Brixton — too strong meat for the babe of
life that is the German Alt-Mddchen !

Mimi G. read poetry and my books, but with difficulty
— much less difficulty than that with which I spoke
German. I have wondered how much we each made each
other understand. It was more a matter of sympathy
than anything else, though, after a few meetings, I had
taken some sort of stock of her mentality and knew what

U6

■**$**» mi^U*. nnu.Ji 4t>M.0wK m,e.

The Flurried Years 127

would " fetch " her. She was too careful of appearances
to come to Assmanshausen — my very chaperon frightened
her, being a divorcee. She preferred that I should come
to her, and she was very anxious that I should see the
various view points that abounded in the district. They
all have a little tea-house. German women will climb
and perspire nobly for any view-point, even one that
they know like the palm of their hand. We all four
went together— I was the only " quite English " member
of the party — in the Zahnradsbahn up to the famous
Aussicht at Fleckhardt's Hohe. It rained. On getting
out of the funicular with two large sets of German natives
I had the prospect of a three-mile tramp before me, and
murmured at it. The women of the other parties sneered
at the man of ours.

" Er ist unter den Pantoffel," they observed, as we
turned to go down again. Thus they marked their
national disapproval of the craven male and betrayed the
attitude of German women generally to Him who must
Not Obey, whoever he may be — father, husband, lover,
soupirant or no relation at all.

Mimi, a lady who in England would have corresponded
to the squire's daughter of a village parish, was in
Germany something of a femme forte with traditions of
free thinking. Her Aunt Laura had kept live lions and
was a Catholic : had fought in the Kiilturkampf and
stolen the corpse of an archbishop out of a Protestant
church. I hope I am getting this right ? Quite definitely
an old maid, whose reading was not censored, she had
read all about the struggle for the emancipation of
women in England, though she was canny enough never
to have worried her mother or the other Hueffers about
it. She begged me now to tell her about women's
suffrage as soon as she heard I had taken part in it and
that her distinguished cousin had condescended to write
a pamphlet in women's favour.

128 The Flurried Years

She had read — and I told her she had read it all
wrong — of suffragettes stopping the carriage of the
Prime Minister and pulling his beard (Mr. Asquith had
none to pull), of wild women strapping themselves to
large and impossible things like the Clock Tower or the
Monument and refusing to come away ; of the virago
Christabel, riding on a meek, white horse, like the Lady
Godiva, into Westminster Hall. But not the slightest
glimmering of the object of it all had ever entered her
head. When I told her that as long ago as 1885 a friend
of mine had, at her wedding, refused to pronounce the
word " obey," she asked me, horror-stricken, if der Herr
had not abandoned her and left the church at once ?
When I told her that the Herr was of the same mind as
his beloved, and that the bride's uncle, officiating, had
allowed his niece to mumble her responses so that no
one could be sure of what she said, Mimi, getting
used to the idea, shrewdly observed that it was a pity
the Lord's daughter had left out the only thing
she could honestly promise to do, since loving and
honouring are dependent on the future conduct of the
parties.

Marriage was a matter of behaviour, Joseph Leopold
then told us and averred that in the Fatherland a
husband can actually divorce his wife for nothing but
disobedience. Mimi did not contradict him, but said that
disobedience was ganz schrecklich, and cut to the very
roots of society. He pressed her for a definition of
Disobedience. "Oh, almost anything ! " she said —
neglecting one's husband, abusing him, defaming him.
A man she knew had divorced his wife just because she
would persist in wearing colours that were distasteful to
her lord. I said that this showed how low the status of
women in Germany must be, when any stick would do to
beat a lap-dog with, and Joseph Leopold said that it
amounted to an admission that what both the parties

The Flurried Years 129

wanted was what the law wanted them to have. In fact,
Collusion !

Mimi was a little outraged, but I patted Germany on
the back — as, indeed, I think she deserved to be patted
if Joseph Leopold spoke true — and began to tell her of
the law of divorce with us and the absolutely indispens-
able grounds for it. Mimi shuddered. What German
Frau was ever unfaithful ? How on earth should she be ?
The minor peccadilloes were grounds enough. And for
a wife to divorce her husband, that was cense never to
happen ! It would be too much honour for the lap-dog.

I saw that the German mentality with regard to this
important relation of man and woman had stopped at
the Fairy-tale period, when the King raised a pyre for
the Swan Maiden he had married and whom he presumed
to be unfaithful, so that her Seven Brothers had had to
come and rescue her just as she was set alight — flapping
the fire out with their large white wings. Yes, Mimi had
a long way to go before she could join the W.S.P.U.
I tried her with some of the anomalies of our so consti-
pated divorce law. The injustices to women it involved,
which was what we suffragettes were up against and would
alter when we got the vote — such as the custody of the
children vested in the husband, his right to decide
whether her child and his should or should not be
vaccinated or brought up in this or that religion, the
tyranny of the dead hand ; the husband's right to appoint
a guardian for the children she had borne over the wife's
head — that all seemed to Mimi perfectly just and
reasonable. Ein Mann muss sein Kinder selbst erziehen.
But when I gave her a concrete instance — what had
happened to my friend, Mrs. Bernard Cato, who joined
the Catholic faith some years after her marriage, so that
Bernard Cato had exercised his right to take two children
under ten out of her care, leaving the baby, whom she
was allowed to keep until it was a year old — Mimi wept.

Iy

130 The Flurried Years

Marriage, a tyranny tempered by divorce, which should
be used freely as being the only way in which people
could bear it ! " Marry early and marry often," as George
Boughton used to say when he was painting Milton in
the garden of Chalfont St. Giles's, dictating dull stuff to
his third wife. But of course I did not dare to make
these ribald jokes to Mimi, religious en diable as she was.
Catholics do not accept divorce as we understand the
marriage. They scorn it. But, then, nothing is easier, it
seemed to me, listening to her, than for Catholics to get
one good enough for their needs for pounds, shillings, and
pence, and under another name — Dispensation— to annul
it.

If a Catholic is willing to pay for it a Catholic can
divorce more easily than a " Prot." But why, if God
cannot divide those whom love and inclination have not
joined permanently, is the Church willing to do His
dirty work for a consideration ? There is, of course, a
prohibitive clause for, according to Mimi, the children of
the marriage to be dissolved will be illegitimate. Pro-
hibitive, I said to Mimi ; for no decent father living in
hell, or even leading a cat and dog life with an uncongenial
mate, would divorce under those conditions. But, said
Mimi, that would be only temporary ; the Church would
see to it that the children were re-legitimatised as soon
as the Dispensation had been obtained. But, of course,
the man mustn't marry again — Mimi always said " Der
Mann " ; women weren't in it in this show.

One way or another the Church must reign, the Church
could do anything that seemed good to it or expedient.

Mimi was awfully pleased to hear that the children
had been brought up as good Catholics in an expensive
school by the sea, where the Mother Superior was an
English lady of title, and the training, apart from religious
teaching, would fit them to take their place in the best
and proudest English society — extras, calisthenics,

The Flurried Years 131

needlework, dancing, drawing, and I don't know what
else. I had seen them all set forth at great length,
together with the holiday fund and the bill for clothing
that the father had paid that very morning. I knew
that this expensive paradise in which his daughters lived
was the joy of his heart — the blue ribbon of his career —
far more important to him, even, than the attainment
of le mot juste. It was practical, too. His Aunt Emma
fully approved of his attitude and of the expensive
presents that he procured for his girls and sent them on
their birthdays — a whole peasant's costume from Marburg
costing fifteen pounds had gone to one and a free-wheel
bicycle to the other, with a violin to follow. . . .

" You must always take good care to preserve the love
and duty of these dear children with good gifts ! " the
old aunt had written.

Mimi, in gratitude to me for the care I took of her
cousin, ended by showering romantic tenderness on me.
I often wonder what became of the household at the
villa at Boppard in the war ; did Carolina's excellent
stews suffer from rationing, as ours did? Did Mimi,
her love turned to bitterness, leave her belligerent cousin
out of her prayers and mention him only in her Morning
Hate?

The Great Catastrophe perforce severed Joseph
Leopold's connection with the Fatherland. For, of
course, they all heard that he had repudiated his newly
gained nationality. This gesture had been taken by
them as a great compliment. But he had afterwards
gone and sworn allegiance to King George, obtained a
commission, and was fighting against them. I never
heard of any of them again after that, except once at the
Cabaret Club, when Joseph Leopold, through a mistake
of one of the waiters, was fetched up from the cellar,
where we all were listening to Frank Harris's Yellow
Ticket, to deal with an angry wife out for arrears of

132 The Flurried Years

alimony — the wife of one of the Dutch Hueffers who had
seen the name on the club register and thought she had
fairly got him.

A breath of England at the Krone ! One day two very
young men, faring on foot to Switzerland — dear Dollie
Radford's son and his friend, David, the son of Edward
and Constance Garnett. The beardless future author of
Lady into Fox stayed to breakfast with us, and passed
onward down the Rhine. From Brienz he wrote that
he was sending me a tortoise — it was on its way, and
he hoped it would get to me before I left. It is, for all
I know, still on its way, for the Countess, anxious to get
back to the hectic joys of her cure at Nauheim, forced
us there.

How different that was ! The deep, conscious strength
of the Rhine flow, the silent forest where, if you walked
for the day, you met only the kindly Fbrster with the
feather stuck in his cap, was exchanged for a plot of villa
residences and gardens where people lazed about
holding glasses connected with their mouths by celluloid
funnels. For the Countess and me a smart hotel —
Bittong's — a ifwr-intentioned place where salads were
made without vinegar and you drank water or, at the
best, Faschingen. For Joseph Leopold, some Hotel
Alexandre or other, but he ate with us, and called, as it
seemed to be understood he would do, every morning
at Bittong's for one or the other of us ladies, was inducted
into the bedroom of either — announced by a smart
chasseur in blue. This would have upset my mother's
guardians considerably if they had come to hear of it.
But, as a matter of fact, there was no proper lounge at
Bittong's ; the hall, in which we all congregated five
minutes before dinner, was draughty.

One evening a notice was posted up begging the guests
not to pursue, persecute, or mob the Tzar of Russia, who

DAVID GAKNETT AND JOSEPil LEOPOLD
AT ASSMANSHAUSEN

The Flurried Years 133

was staying at Friedberg, three miles off, and who came
in every day with the Tzaritza and her children. Poor
Alix of Hesse, mortally ill, had turned as a last resource
to the healing waters of her native province and her
husband had complained that the Nauheimers followed
him and her about and stared. This would, if continued,
prevent him from coming to that place. It must be
stopped. It was.

There was more than fear of mobbing ; there was the
fear of the bomb. He went in danger of his life so obvious
and so imminent that the craven and businesslike munici-
pality of Friedberg had insisted on his insuring the public
monuments of that place at his own expense !

It was his chamberlain's duty to disseminate fallacious
announcements of his movements. When he was sup-
posed to be going to the baths it was at the Kursaal
you would find him ; when it was the riding school
it was much more likely to be the lake. I have seen him
there, a disconsolate figure, encouraging his boy to sail
his tiny boat or being rowed about in one. I certainly
never mobbed him. In the same accidental way I often
saw the Tzaritza, in black with pearls, going in and out
of the baths, her face a tragic mask, stupid, incompetent,
haughty, dejected. She looked a lovely fool ; nay, hardly
lovely now — the morbid shadow of a queen. And once I
saw him through the windows, like glass walls, of a shop
full of Venetian glass, Japanese netsuke, and plaques of
green jade. The shopman was showing him some objet
d'art or other, and the Tzarewitch, whose head did not
come up to the counter, was with him. No one else.
The door of the shop had been left open, and some sensible
German passer-by had shut it. Nicholas II looked up and
out — he thought he was trapped ! I saw his face through
the beautiful clear glass ; it did not exhibit mere terror, for
he was a brave man, but all at once it seemed implicit
with a summing-up, a resume of the composite agony of

134 The Flurried Years

all this race of kings consciously marked down for destruc-
tion. His grandfather before him — his uncle — and only
the little son with his head below the counter to carry on
the monstrous imposthume of Russian Royalty !

There was also a Regnant Grand Duke — he of Hesse-
Darmstadt — a relation of the King of England, his
features trh en Edouard, as I could see. I was intro-
duced to him by Count Leloffel, one of the " favourite
officers of the Kaiser " with which this place abounded.
The Duke's palace at Giessen he had turned into a
barracks, and now, having divorced his wife easily for
incompatibility, he dissipated the rents of his dukedom,
playing bridge daily in the tented verandah of the
Kursaal or in the parterre, among the red geraniums,
the blue caps of the bandsmen and the variegated
toilettes of the Americans, the cocottes and the professional
beauties. He expected to be asked out to dinner there by
some or other of these every night, and was. Joseph Leopold
and I used to get up early and go there for a walk among
the laurels and rhododendron hedges in the gentle grey
autumn mornings. Then it was deserted even of waiters,
all engaged in washing up, dawdling, mock-busying
themselves, holding themselves in reserve till midday,
when the band would rustle into its place and the little
striped red table-cloths were spread on the little tin
tables.

Leloffel, whom I distinguished with difficulty — for
German officers look very nearly alike — was what we
should call in England " a card " ! He was supposed to
have hurt himself rather badly at polo, performing
before the Kaiser, and this was the chic cause of his
presence at Nauheim. The Kaiser was given out to be
excessively anxious about the health of this tall, spare,
eager, wasp-waisted creature. In the course of three
days I both obliged and insulted Lieutenant Leloffel,
and I wondered, if another day in revenge for the latter,

The Flurried Years 135

he would come to spit one of my friends on the point of
that everlasting sword that hangs always at the side of
gentlemen of his kidney, and when they sit down beside
you on the most pacific occasions trails awkwardly on the
ground between. At least, I was told that I had insulted
him when I declared that German officers were not
always polite to ladies in the street, and how I had
been driven off the side-walk twelve years ago by an
officer at Wiesbaden, who had absolutely treated me
as if I did not even occupy the very small space on the
path that I was surely entitled to. Leloffel bent his
weary, small eyes with their red rims on me, and, saying
haughtily, " Wie, Frdulein ? Sie sagen . . . ? " laid his hand
on the hilt of his sword. I felt it stir between us. But
the Countess, who was sitting at the same table, inter-
posed, and said that the German of the Fraulein was
uncertain . . . the Fraulein had not meant. . . .

And I obliged him. He was admiring, not to say
following, in the Allee every morning a young American
lady who was staying, not at my hotel, but at that of
Mrs. T. P. O'Connor. She had a pale, clear-cut face and
firm chin, lifting out of the white jabot of her tailor-made,
and neat ankles — a change for Germany ! — in high-heeled
shoes with a big bow on the instep.

"It is that I admire," said Leloffel. "It is so well
tied — as if it would never come undone."

I soon got him an introduction to his enchantress, but
the affair came to nothing. To the so spiritually minded
favourite of the Kaiser The Dream was more than The
Business. . . . But I had made good reparations, and
he even wrote to me after he got home. His letter was
an extraordinary document, and not at all the letter I
should have associated with a German officer. It
seemed quite mad !

I think the German military mind was already, in
those days, beginning to be " above itself." I am sure

136 The Flurried Years

it had been, as Disraeli said of another form of decadence,
" well guanoed " with all sorts of morbid imaginings,
moral and military. Socially it was rottenish. Mr.
Fortescue told someone I knew that the scandalous
novels on which they were gloating over there in the
Fatherland would have been seized in England. They
were, when they were translated. See that novel by
the great Sudermann which the late bold John Lane
published — a truly wonderful psychological study which
would have gained the wrong sort of readers because of
its biblical name, but which was hardly out before it
was withdrawn from circulation. Or read Lieutenant
Bilse's In einer kleine Gamison, a copy of which the
slinky, rather bestial, and exceedingly vain author
presented to me specially bound with silver clasps
when he came to my garden-party in 1906. Leloffel
was probably a superior specimen of the race that was
growing up in Germany, corrupted by the evil com-
munications of such novels as I have described and the
moral and military divagations of Bernhardi and
Treitschke. Such sadic cruelty as was perpetrated
by the flower of Germany's manhood in 1914 was, I
imagine, less the outcome of beer and innate brutality
than of absinthe and a creeping paralysis of moral ideas.
They were all, at least, potential Ludwigs of Bavaria.

I had always thought till those days of the Law as a
free thinker or a sectarian might consider of the priest-
hood of a State religion in which he did not participate,
and would never, D.V., need to — an establishment
that did what it liked with its own and took occasion
to nag, plague, rack, and sometimes to make autos da
fe of persons who, coming under its control, controverted
its doctrines and disobeyed its decrees. But that is,
of course, if one was fool enough to consult it, put oneself
into its hands ! Old-fashioned people used to say,

The Flurried Years 137

" Always settle out of court. Never go to law if you can
help it." But how if Law comes to you? Courts were
made to be kept out of, but how if other people take you
into them ? I had never imagined myself or any of my
family coming within a hundred miles of court, and I
have been in three or four already. And now I was under
the law, a frequenter of its ugly, cock-eyed, dingy palace
that had been actually designed by my father's friend,
George Edmund Street, and gained him a knighthood —
prone to suffer goodness knows what scrapings of one's
vanity, digs of opposing counsel ; lifting of the lid of one's
heart, its piteous loves and inchoate hatreds disclosed
under the low arch of heaven whence came no sort of
help ! Though, terrified one had appealed on one's own
account to justice and its priests . . . some kind, some
cruel, but all very urbane.

Familiarity bred not contempt so much as disgust.
One had read Phantasies and had a sense of wandering
in a forest at night, or knocking oneself against the boles
of malignant, half-humanised trees, one's face stung by
the lashes of savage boughs, stumbling over snags,
falling into the pits and gins that man lays for man,
entanglements — unfortunate phrases — the Wood of the
World !

There were compensations, of course. There were
amenities, messages from the enemy's camp. The Beauty
still wrote sweetly to the editor, discussing the parish
reading club that was now " on " the Odyssey, after
Sir Walter Scott's Rokeby.

There were sweet and fallacious letters from Mary
Martindale and wise and sensible ones from her horse-
breaker Aunt Stringer, from whose husband's colliery I
supplied my mother's coal-cellar. Mrs. Stringer was a
great stand-by till a horse broke her — fell on her and
killed her.

Even Goneril — dear little Goneril that I loved —

138 The Flurried Years

sneaked a letter to me now and then, sermonising me,
calling me a thief and a liar, as her way was, but con-
taining vague aspirations for an improvement in our
relations if I would confess my errors and be clean. The
Receivership plan was going to placate everybody. . . .

The time drew near when I must go home for it. And
I wanted so much to see Marburg and the potters making
pots on the high-road, and the students that fight,
letting other students slice off the tops of their crowns
like an orange so that they can then exhibit the scar.
The Countess was willing and we were to go on Thursday
to the Hotel Zum Ritter, on the Elisabethen Platz,
and I should see plenty of blue-ribbed crowns.

But before Thursday — and I did not know how fateful
a day it was — bidden by her who was deeply interested in
us, Joseph Leopold took the train to Giessen, a university
town half an hour away, and returned in time for dinner,
when he told us, looking as portentous as might be with
his mild blue eyes, that we would all go on Wednesday to
Marburg as arranged and leave him there behind us. He
was going to stay on in Germany.

He had taken one of those sudden resolutions, those
sudden burgeonings of resolve, poison flowers that blow
in a single day out of a concealed and tedious growth of
dull misgiving, daily distastes, and nightmare appre-
hensions. The root of this flower was a sense of injustice
and injury ; Brixtons, hecklings, humblings and lower-
ings of natural pride had manured it ; secret tears had
watered it and brought it to the birth.

Some minds — not mine — move very slowly and nourish
quietly, until it is very strong, a grim determination to do
something foolish, the madder the merrier — or the sadder !
Something justifiable, but not as the world goes for
poetical justice — a phrase that used to figure so largely
in the accounts by our ancestors of the violent deaths

The Flurried Years 139

of murderers and impious men — is, in the eyes of the
law, the least valid of excuses, the most cogent in those
of the layman, and, in the long run, most tragic, ineffec-
tual, and irrevocable.

But to the distracted soul it seemed to imply an
end to the law's lawful chicane, delays, and pretermissions,
of tedious interim orders, worrying petitions, irritating
reports, of plank beds and prison loaves, the dread of the
knock of the postman or process server, the moral and
mental discomfort that is the bane and impediment of
masterpieces. Joseph Leopold, as he said himself in
Ancient Lights, was " an Englishman a little mad about
Good Letters." Good Letters, in the Flaubertian sense,
were to him more important than king or country, wife
or mistress.

For my state of mind at this juncture Joseph Leopold's
simile — " a sparrow hopping about among the horses'
hoofs " — would seem to be fairly correct, though humilia-
ting. Or say the Little Tailor of Grimm, who got out
of most things and many tight places because he was so
small.

The way I understood and accepted what Joseph
Leopold was going to do is best shown by some letters I
wrote about this time to Rene Byles, who was, at this
moment, in London, occupying Number 84, and posting
on letters and being general souffre-douleur to us both.

Byles was sure to disapprove, being a true-born Briton,
a hater of all foreigners — he was capable of calling a
Frenchman " mounseer," and if he met a Japanese in
the street when walking with me, would pull me out of
the way lest I rubbed shoulders with him — of foreign
books, foreign cookery, foreign laws and customs. The
odd thing about Byles — and perhaps what made him
so charming — was that he had lived half his life in
Japan, and that his middle name, as well as his Norman
brow and nose, bespoke him of foreign origin. The

140 The Flurried Years

De Beuzevilles were Huguenot refugees from the severities
of the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes. Sometimes,
to tease him, I would bring up the slaughter by Huguenots
of Catholics in the barn at Vassy, when he alluded to
the massacre of St. Bartholomew. But where he dis-
approved he helped, and he was a good fighter. Every
journalist remembers the row over The Times Book
Club. Blessed be his memory !

But, so little does one know of the kinks in the cranky
old chain of Providence, that my best friends would find
it impossible to imagine that his help was to prove my
hindrance. However, for us he fought and slaved to
the very end, till one day — a sheeted ghost in the
Hydro at Richmond, with pale arms flung out of bed
where the blood had retreated right up to the elbow
and would retreat still further — the White Death (as
I would call the disease he suffered from) took
him. Until he was too weak, and after — I never got
such a talking to as on the last time I saw him ! — he
spoke his mind to me. He tried to be a slipper on the
wheels of the coach that, through untried ways, was
rolling on to disaster.

Hard-bitten, never very genial, thin, without an ounce
of superfluous or even enough flesh on his body, extremely
severe, cold and cynical sometimes, like the man of
Northern France he was, he did not mince facts, as when
he exhorted me gently : " not to place so much reliance
on perennial charm."

I wrote from Marburg :

" He has gone, by the advice of his Aunt Emma,
who is naturally anxious to secure the continuance of
the stay of such a great man and to acquire his name
for Germany, to a place called Giessen, half an hour
from here by train. The Countess has told him of a
clever German lawyer there. He went and unearthed

The Flurried Years 141

him only yesterday, and he is at present busily
engaged in getting papers translated. I wish I could
read German. The annoying thing is that I am
rather ill and due home, while I fancy from what
he says, F. will have to stay on in Germany for
six months in order to get it through, unless, indeed,
he makes such a good impression in a month that the
authorities feel inclined to declare him a German
through his father's naturalisation in 1872. We
are quite friends here with the Grand Duke of the
particular State to which he will belong."

Byles must have been puzzled. I had to write and
explain that the father of Joseph Leopold, Franz Hiiffer,
who shook the dust of the Fatherland off his feet and
came over to England in the seventies (it seemed, at
first, merely to edit the Tauchnitz edition of Rossetti's
poems and play backgammon with him) had, after
marrying the daughter of Ford Madox Brown, taken
out naturalisation papers which might or might not
have included his unborn children.

" The dear conceited Germans, you see, do not
allow a whimsical father by one rash act to deprive
his children of the inestimable advantage of German
citizenship, and the Government makes it as easy as
possible for them to resume it. They have only to
se donner la peine of acquiring domicile and getting
the burgomasters of some particular German town
to accept them as persons likely to be good towns-
fellows and rich enough to pay their rates regularly. . . .
I am going to buy an Ulmer dog here at Cappel, and
bring it home. I don't know what my maid will say.
God knows how many more responsibilities I am going
to take up ! Will you be very kind and see about
quarantine rules for me ? One does so wonder what
is going to be the end of it all ? "

142 The Flurried Years

God knows, indeed ! The sparrow hopping about
among the horses' hoofs. Quarantine regulations —
Naturalisation — Ulmer dogs — International law — and
much else !

Indeed, there seemed to be going to be an end of me
that month at Marburg. " Blood upon the Buttercups "
indeed ! My vision at Selsey this very spring, and the
queer and beautiful poem which Joseph Leopold, quick
to seize any artistic material, had written, with that for
the clou, in June. I remembered it in these days when
I seemed to be bleeding to death, and the doctor from
the Klinik went into the matter so brutally that I wept.
I had never been ill before. The Countess was giving
him an account of my symptoms. " Up at Markese's
last night, plotzlich sie schwindelt." It sounded to me
as if she was accusing me of fraud. Here in Germany,
as well as at home ! Dr. Bauereisen said gently, in a
voice far softer than his hands, that the gnddige Fraulein
must be operated on at once — costing nine pounds at
the klinik. I said that that was quite impossible, that
I had engagements in England, and that he must mend
me up for a week, say, when I would go home and get it
done there — for twenty-one pounds, as it turned out.
I was put to bed, and fed on Suppe mit Ex. Bauereisen
was clever, for soon I was sitting up in bed and
Joseph Leopold was dictating to me his memoirs, for
which I found a name, and a bad one, as it turned out.

The last chapter of it is full of Heine and idealism. The
death of the Ritter Olaf, who ran away with the King's
daughter and had his head cut off by the lady's father
for his pains. But what cared he ? He was allowed his
wedding night ! He dies at midnight by the light of
torches, blessing the sun, blessing the moon, the violets,
and the blue eyes of his wife !

I suppose I was cantankerous, for I fell foul of a phrase
in the last chapter, when the Author, " a little mad about

The Flurried Years 143

Good Letters" — a little, good Lord! — fancies himself
arrived in his author's heaven at last, wandering among
green trees and coloured lamps, listening to the whisper-
ings of a happy crowd — his eternal desideratum — blest
I, as well as him, wandering with their beloveds — " And
too, will have on my arm someone I like very much. . . ."

Well, Bauereisen mended me, and the Receivership
business was put off, and as Joseph Leopold liked to have
me on his arm, I stayed on a little. . . .

The autumn was far advanced, and the walks down to
Cappel to see the dog, to the horse fair at Warmund, up
to the Wilhelmsthurm to watch the Kermesse, the slim
little peasant girls, nearly bald at fifteen, dancing in
costume, with Berlin woolwork sashes in violent futurist
colours round their waists or where their waists . . . ?
consuming between the dances the contents of the heavy
beer-barrels which, in preparation for this one afternoon,
had been rolled up, as were the fat German Fraus by
their wholesomely perspiring husbands — men of good-
will— on to the plateau where the sward was level.
But this was not for me. We would have to keep on
the flat, going for our teas every afternoon in a little
motor-boat down the little Lahn to a little village called
Wehrda, where there was a little, sad, stale cafe set down
in a stony garden of gravel, with trees bare of their
leaves and a few tables with check table-covers blowing
about in the wind that was preparing the garden for
winter. Germany at a disadvantage for once !

Gloomily we sat and consumed Sand Kiichen, that
seemed made of the gravel of the walk and ran out of
the corners of our mouths, or chunks of cold plum tart
called Pflaum Kiichen, and observed critically the Wesen

if the future compatriots of Joseph Leopold, striped and
necked women, children and bundles — checks are a

144 The Flurried Years

on the opposite bank puffing away under the tunnel
Cassel-wards, where we would go some day.

And on my birthday came the news that I must dally
no longer abroad, and that Joseph Leopold had better
bestir himself and go to live in the lodgings that
he had taken at Giessen, 29 Nordanlage, so as to be near
his Rechtsanwalt, Herr Paul John — pronounced Powl-
yone. It looked, written, like our good old English John,
but, lengthened so, it was rather sinister. . . .

Joseph Leopold saw me as far as Cologne, and I went
the rest of the way alone, without the Ulmer dog and
violently depressed. However, in the society of my own
mother and the mother of Joseph Leopold, and Mary
Martindale, and my faithful maid and Byles, I forgot the
great Dane. There was the nice, ugly bulldog which had
worried eight sheep, a snub-nosed darling which, after
its translation from the glooms of the stable at Aldington,
bit no one but me.

But again I was depressed. Beauty, who still wrote
to Joseph Leopold, never wrote to me. I forced her
little hand. I asked her to stay. The simple answer
came :

" Mother doesn't want me to come."

Her letter was to me of an indescribable pathos, for
I knew Beauty loved me.

" I only wish you had a little house in the country,
and then I could. ... I know that I am deserting
you at the only time you will ever want me again.
Dear Aunt V., I love you, but I love father too, so
you must try not to be too cross with me. If you
must be ... I don't care what you do if you stop
loving me. Perhaps I deserve it, but I don't think I
do. . . ."

No, of course she didn't, the darling ! She was just

The Flurried Years 145

an unsophisticated country girl— not a butterfly, as I
would perhaps have had her be, but a dear little dormouse
that her family was putting into the teapot, or, say, a
bird tangled in the nets of Victorian conventions, unable
to understand, bewildered in the wind of the flail of her
mother's lawsuit.

For, weak and tottery from illness, I was hoisted into
a position I deprecated earnestly, that of Receiver of my
mother's estate. It was done, and I passed out of the
stone- walled halls of the ugly palace of justice which
my father's friend had made. I walked out alone through
the iron doors that led into Fleet Street, knowing per-
fectly well what a welter I was going into. There were
envious eyes, a hundred rods in pickle for me, weapons
concealed in the boskage of Campden Hill, sharp, bright,
ready to be used if I made any sort of fool of myself.
Errors of judgment would be visited p.d.q. by the usual
punishment meted out to unjust or even foolish stewards.
The sparrow, hopping off the pavement to go home, was
in dread now of the great hoofs. . . .

Ky

iojo-ii

First Year of Exile — Marooned in Germany — Complaints — Unwise dash
to England — Operation — D. H. Lawrence's sympathy — Dawn of a Year
of Litigation — Prayers at the Tomb of Charlemagne — Paris and the
" Rice-pale Queen " — Arnold Bennett, the Tango and the Leg of Mutton
— The Children complex — We Part — Beardsley's Hotel in Brussels —
The Editor to Giessen — Business — " Dining himself in " — fudges and
Arbiters of Fate — Giessen Worthies — The German Police — Diplomacies
— Kowtowing — Smarter Rooms — Furnished or Unfurnished ? — The
Fatal Decision.

And over there in Germany was Joseph Leopold pleading,
moaning, his " languid, plangent tenor " inaudible to
me by any wave transference, but working his feeling
off in letters as only a poet can. He is hopeful and
hopeless by turns. He is annoyed at the slowness of
the Rechtsanwalt ; he is dying just to run across to me
and see how I am, which would of course be suicidal
to his hopes. " John says, ' Wait, it will all be well.' '
The typist he employs to copy out his awful pothooks
and hangers, consequent on an attack of writer's cramp,
twigs her employer's restlessness, so un-German, and
says, " What do you want to go to London for ? Kiessen
iss gut enoff! " In the languid, plangent tenor, he
informs her : " But it isn't, it isn't ! " He is triste,
triste en veriU, bored stiff, as we say now, going in the
intervals of his desk for dull walks with the dull Johns,
calling on dull professors in the college, going over now
and then for gold to Jena to lecture dully on the Pre-
Raphaelites, his forebears, to Dr. Schiicking's eager
pupils, " talking himself in " slowly with genius —
and its far-flung reputation, penetrating into this Fester

Burg of Germany of which he desires to be a citizen.

146

The Flurried Years 147

And, these trifling escapades apart, he is " pegging away
at Mr. Sorrel in the deep silence that has fallen on me."
He is not unhappy, only numb.

I had pressed for a description of 29 Nordanlage, and
I got it. He had two rooms, the one giving on to the
other. " In one is a table, a writing-desk, a sofa, five
chairs, and about two hundred and fifty ornaments,
ranging from bits of coral like human brains, to gilded
busts of Lohengrin. In the other room is a bed, a table,
a chest of drawers, cupboard, washstand, and two
hundred and fifty more ornaments." He was on the
ground floor ; the entrance was very dark, but the rooms
were light and airy ; the house smelt always of onions ;
the landlady appeared to be a deaf mute, and had bad
teeth. " The sanitary arrangements are those that so
horrify you, but are at a good distance."

Opposite the window was a little strip of green, covered
now with orange-coloured leaves from the chestnut
tree. It was the fifth of October. " Many children
play there all day, exploding percussion caps ; from
time to time they climb on to the railings, grin in at me
as I sit writing, and exclaim, "Tag! Engldnder ! "
Rooms and breakfast cost forty m. a month ; lunch
fifty pfg. (sixpence a day)."

I gathered he got up at eight-thirty, breakfasted at
nine, and then walked along a strip of green, round the
park, round the town to John's office to ask for letters,
returning by ten-thirty and settling down to write, in
dirt and discomfort ; " the landlady informs me
regularly that she did not expect me so soon and has
not had time to sweep the room. At one she brings
me a plate of soup, a plate of the beef the soup has been
made from, and three pickled gherkins."

Mrs. Braun was no cook. When there was fish it was
so bad that, not to hurt her pride, the author would
put it in a drawer and forget it. His mother found these

I

148 The Flurried Years

proofs of good-feeling among his shirts when she came
to stay there. And after this lunch of sorts: "I walk
the streets till three-thirty, slumber till four-thirty,
write till six, go to dinner in the town (Hotel Gross
Herzog, souper 1.50), come home at nine, write till ten,
play patience till eleven, and go to bed. So the genius
(Ich danke dir, Jeude, da du mir das Wort gegeben hast !)
that England so inhospitably had exiled from her shores
passes his eventful days. I write these words in German
because last night I went to see The Merchant of Venice."

I never got a letter that was not shot with the agony
of writer's cramp, which every doctor he had ever con-
sulted told him was just a nervous symptom, aggravated
by loneliness. " The pain is fairly intermittent. When
I write legibly the pain is bad ; when I don't take
trouble, and write illegibly, nothing to speak of. I
shall get along. I have been writing all the morning
at this. One o'clock — Lo ! — Mrs. Braun with soup . . .
one-ten — soup eaten ! ... It is dreary, still weather
with leaves falling everywhere. Mrs. Braun has brought
some meat that looks like worsted. . . . Yes, I smoke
cigars at 5 pfg. (a halfpenny)."

The army, later, cured the cramp. But here was a
dreary state of things, and it should be ended as soon
as possible. I had never seen John, and rather hoped
I never should. But I was British enough to want a
British opinion. I wrote off on my own account to
Sir John Westlake, the eminent international lawyer
and another of my father's old friends — how good they
were to me, and how I tried them ! Old John West-
lake, as his Cornish tenants called him and his pony
impartially, who adored Papa and Sir Charles Dilke,
and would never believe any harm of the latter. He
answered that he had lots of time in Cornwall, and would
tell me anything I liked. I put the case to him. His
answer, though hard and contradictious of certain ready

The Flurried Years 149

and fallacious assumptions of mine, was kindly and
reassured me completely as to the main point, telling
me plainly what rested with me to do.

I made up my mind to carry out faithfully his prescrip-
tions as far as I could. They involved a good deal of
grandmotherly legislation, and would irritate Joseph
Leopold. He was so fundamentally careless of every-
thing that did not concern literature. It was certain
that he must not come to England to see me through
my " little flutter," as I called my operation. I wrote
and told him that it was going to be a very minor
operation and that he must on no account worry about it.

And so it was— very minor. One afternoon Mary
Martindale took me to a certain house in Minden Terrace
— strange how Germany followed me even there ! — and
put me in the hands of a matron who, having read my
books and conceiving of me, therefore, as une femme forte,
was sensible enough to enter into a bargain with me. I
was to be allowed one visitor every day, and only one,
who could stay from three till six— two hours longer than
the usual time. I on my side contracting to eat well and
never have a temperature. I kept my word, and she kept
hers. As far as getting up a temperature went I had
no inclination to do so, although there was a constant
coming and going in my room of jolly Irish nurses,
coming one by one to see my French nightgowns, and
although I was given pork for dinner the day after I
had been " cut."

The stipulation as to the daily visitor arose from the
fact that Fraulein Reiss, of " Kiessen, gut enoff! " could
not succeed in keeping her employer's nose to his desk.
He got the surreptitious telegram that his sister-in-law
sent him about me the day before at ten o'clock, and,
starting at midnight, was in London half an hour after

ertals of the home had closed upon me. That
I, lonely, disconsolate, full of castor oil and little

150 The Flurried Years

else, I sat on my bed like a frightened performer before
the play, when I was suddenly summoned to the 'phone
downstairs, and, lifting the receiver, listened again to a
voice not heard since two months ago on Cologne plat-
form. I sent for the matron and made the bargain.

Next morning at seven they dressed me in what seemed
to be a diver's suit, a shirt and leggings of wool up to
my waist, and sent me down breakfastless to the waiting-
room, furnished with a chair and a telephone, while my
bedroom was being " done." I dared not use the tele-
phone, though Joseph Leopold was at my mother's
house, because he was there incognito. I waited there
alone from seven till nine, when I was fetched back for
the doctor (a Mrs., for a suffragette cannot call in any-
thing else) to work her will on. My own room, when I
was again led into it, seemed all white. There was no
bed that I could see, but a linen-covered trestle — it looked
like an ironing board — on which I was told to stretch
myself. In passing I had noticed a table on which there
lay a splendid array of knives. And then — blessed gas !
I love it. And then — waking on my bed all right
and seeing a nurse sitting with her back to me at the
fire making herself an apron — and a cup of tea — and my
maid with my letters — and Joseph Leopold to come at
three ! It was just eleven then. I was told not to
wriggle much. Why should I ? I felt no pain.

I was not alone more than one day, the day Joseph
Leopold sneaked down to see his children in their convent
for what, though he did not know it, was going to be the
last time before he went out to fight in 1915. He was
taking them the necklaces of amber I had threaded for
them out of my big haul of twelve — not necklaces but
neck-collars — that I had bought in a Marburg pawnshop,
the deposit, I suppose, of needy Prussian peasant women
gone poor under the Prussian regime.

I had some very nice letters, several from the friend

The Flurried Years 151

of Joseph Leopold, D. H. Lawrence, who wrote and said
he was so sorry I should be " being played all out of
tune like a badly handled violin." He wanted money
to get married, and he sent me — actually in this connec-
tion— the MS. of two plays. Presently there came a
third, " rather more raggy," which he had refrained at
first from sending — " afraid it was too rowdy to send to
a lady muffled up in a nursing-home ! " It was Mrs.
Holroyd.

Not at all. I wasn't ill. I was quite happy. Though
my bed wasn't exactly a bed of roses, it was soft enough.
This was the only " lie down " that I had ever submitted
to. Taken all in all, those ten days were the happiest
of my life. I corrected my own new book, covered my
bed with MS. and papers, boxes and rolls, till the nurses
squeaked with amusement every time they came in,
and I read carefully what I had taken down when I was
too ill to know what I was doing, namely Ancient Lights,
just out, with a dedication, " To my Kids."

Shock number two out of that book !

Beauty did not write, but her mother did. Perhaps
Beauty's strong sense of moderation came into play ;
I must not have too much at once, even of pleasure,
for Goneril's letter was a letter of sympathy — stark,
severe sympathy, but still sympathy.

In truth, as regards my sister, our love, which at
one time amounted to a passion, died hard and subsisted
for very long — languishing, moribund almost, but still
there. I was aware of it in her letters to me ; cropping
up steadily every now and again, these showed tender-
nesses, allusions to our common past, sandwiched in
between crude sternnesses that were embodied in parrot-
like phrases showing the poor little mind diseased,
infected with a virus, corroded with suggestions altogether
foreign to her gentle, upright, unsubtle nature.

This queer entente between her and the woman she

152 The Flurried Years

was " lamming into " survived through recriminations,
arraignings, and accusations and at the last, when the
pencil strokes grew weak and spidery as if deprecating
their significance — of peculation, fraud, and forgery
even — through endless pages to where the inept production
trailed off into the signature and helpless assurances of
love. For she was no artist, not even an unconscious
one. She was merely a pretty, uncommonly silly, vain,
and temperamental woman, as good as gold but her
mind lying prone and plastic under the drillings of
intelligences superior to her own. They worried her.
She did not find them soothing.

Our Aunt Jane was about on her mental level, and
Goneril always sent her a goose at Christmas with gam-
ishings of knitted woollies and so on. She slept a good
deal, and preferred sitting to standing, and lying down
to either. These days she generally lay on a sofa and
made herself blouses beautifully. The last communication
that she made me after we had ever so slightly come
together, just before her death, was a picture-postcard
bearing on one side the usual Christmas congratulations,
and on the other a tank, ploughing along with its back
up !

Joseph Leopold returned to Germany the day I left
the nursing-home.

And then there followed the hideous proposition to
go away for a change. That " change," always so same,
so cold, so dull, and in the depths of winter, too ! East-
bourne— the very name is chilly — or at best Bourne-
mouth, or perhaps Ventnor. And alone. My mother's
journey ings were done. I yearned for a place where
Joseph Leopold could come and stay, meeting me half
way, from Germany. . . . Abroad ? That would be
expensive, or seem expensive. Commend me to English
spas for dearness !

The Belgian one ! Just across the frontier from

5

w

GONERIL IN" BED

p. L53

The Flurried Years 153

Germany ! I wrote to my godfather and enlisted his
sympathies. He knew Aunt Jane. He had lately written
to my mother and told her not to let me be " ploted " —
alluding to the plucking process which prepares geese, and
ducks too, for the table. He sent me fifty quid and his
blessing if I would go from Spa to a place in the Ardennes
called Laroche and buy him a ham of a pig fed on juniper
— one of the specialities of this place. He enclosed an
old label off a parcel which had once enwrapped such a
dainty.

But I had a good deal to do before I could leave Eng-
land. I had to get the editor out of No. 84 ; furniture
and books to sort ; an angry bank manager — whom
Joseph Leopold had forgotten to warn that he was open-
ing an account at another bank — to pacify ; and my own
affairs to attend to, that is to say, some harassing
appearances before the Master in Lunacy, who, perhaps
because he could not see, always seemed to my jaundiced
eyes to insist on taking the wrong view. His nice wife
happened to be a friend of the family's, but do you
think he took any notice of that ? Caesar too was above
suspicion. What so disagreeably affected me was the
fact that he only heard voices and never saw faces, so
that he never knew when a speech was left unfinished
or whether one looked a decent, credible sort of person
or no. That made it very difficult to behave, and no
doubt he thought one wasn't behaving ! One was so
totally unused to the brass tacks of law as to expect
drawing-room manners and social amenities— to be
listened to when one was speaking and have one's
sentences finished for one rather than submit to their
being nipped in the bud all the time !

About a week before Christmas I got off to Spa, where
an old colleague of the Pall Mall Gazette and the World,
lived. Therese Descours was married to the principal
doctor of the sad Queen of the wicked Leopold in her

154 The Flurried Years

retreat at Laeken. And Joseph Leopold from Giessen,
where he kept his rooms, was there to meet me ; he
lodged at Alighans's, next door to the Guilleaumes.

And then there began a funny little life in this funny-
little, very old-fashioned ville d'eau, that does not even
boast a Consul, whose inhabitants are so good that they
have abolished the tables and live on the waters. There
is one spring outside the Pouhon, where all the Spadois
come with jugs to draw their drinking-water. In the
mornings Joseph Leopold tried to teach me German, to
improve my literary style, and wrote prefaces to my book,
which Mr. Pawling unfailingly turned down, with the
polite excuse that good wine needed no bush. Or Joseph
Leopold played golf at Balmoral, the club high up in the
snowy hills overhanging Spa, and I went up there to tea
and ate cramique, the cake of the country. Now and
then we made little journeys to Liege, where a surprisingly
clever doctor lived. Or we took the train to Germany,
where Joseph Leopold was supposed to be living. That
is one of the ways he always managed to queer his own
pitch.

On New Year's Eve the snow hung on the trees in a
solid wall of white over the red roofs of Spa, and we all
went over to supper at Alighans's, and Joseph Leopold
made his famous punch. And when day dawned on
what was to prove a year of bitter, continuous litigation,
he fetched me early, and we took the train. At eleven
o'clock on New Year's Day, ign, he and I, kneeling
painfully on the stones of the Cathedral at Aix la Chapelle,
over the tomb of Charlemagne, in the company of other
godly Germans, in the coloured darkness of the great
rose window, smelling the bitter-sweet of the incense,
heard Mass.

I was rapt . . . but Joseph Leopold, kneeling at my
side — misliking his attitude, the cold stones, or suddenly
appalled perhaps, by all this ceremonial : envisaging the

The Flurried Years 155

enormity of the task he had set himself — was in a sense
unsympathetic to me. A cold, patient man, without fire,
lazy of habit : his heart, dull-beating, was perhaps more
faint about it all than he was willing to let it appear. It
wasn't really his job, and he was up against clever, shrewd
people who had spent all their lives at it and had not
novels to write, but gained their living in a less nervous
way. And I sometimes think that in disgust at the
obvious disparity he took a sort of pride in sticking to —
in putting all his wits into his own profession, and making
the other his hobby. Just playing at law was a relaxation
from the stern professional necessity of finding— let us
call it — les mots justes, and plenty of them. The wild-cat
schemes, absurd solutions of the insoluble, incredible
lapses, quick changes, like the permutations of a shilling
shocker, that this artist liked to put up ! He was deter-
mined to get — he could not help getting — the fierce
ancestral colours — Brunonian madder red and vandyke
brown — always into his plots, schemes, and books. For
he was the grandson of the painter of " Parisina," who,
as a boy, lived in Brussels and near the Wiertz Museum,
absorbing its horrors till he came to see all life, even still
fife, like matter in a rage — dipping his brush into a deep,
strong, silent fount of colour, to which everything
must be " brought up " — prone to fallacies and supersti-
tions ; capable of generosities, obstinations, and long
endurances. I notice this in the grandson's work —
always the passions of his puppets are set forth with a
reasonable, yet cloudy violence. His villains are
as lazy in vice as his saints are active in piety — -never
" quite or'nery folk like you and me." But Joseph
Leopold condescended not to go into the mental processes
of either you or of me. His habitual disregard of the
mentality of others played their game.

Here is a letter from him to me : a bomb, the pro-
posed casual treatment of great issues. " I should

156 The Flurried Years

rather like to suggest having one of the children over
here for their holidays — but I don't quite see how to
fit it in." I should think not, indeed ! I wonder if
he remembered the answer of a Prime Minister — a post
which I pretty well occupied to him — to a potentate
who proposed a little rectification of frontiers : " Only
three kingdoms, sire."

A veil of pride and mental libertinage seemed to come
over his eyes and made him — so knowledgeable — as blind
as those that can't see. And simple ! Anybody could
" do " this sapient creature, whose vision strayed far
beyond them and missed them. It reminded me of
the " kidding " of the short-sighted Mr. Spooner that
I used to observe in the streets of Oxford. The under-
grads, out of bounds or peccant in some way, used to
run the gauntlet fearlessly, nip past him as near as
possible under his nose, and so escape " gating."

He told me with modest pride the story of the deer
in the pen in the yard of the Grosser Herzog in Giessen,
where he had stayed when he was looking for lodgings.
The deer was being fattened for the table. It was in
a twisted cage of boughs in the hotel grounds, where
the children, passing, prodded it and poked it with
sticks, and threw mock food to the wild and vulnerable
creature that had nothing to do but lie down in its
misery and hope to be killed and eaten soon.

Joseph Leopold bought him alive for two pounds
ten, hired a cart, took him to the Hunnen Grabe
beyond the town, and let him bound away to the forest.
But, when I came to Giessen, I went to see the place of
this humane exploit, and a deer undergoing the same
treatment was in the pen. . . .

Certainly, through this year at least, I lived like that
deer, vulnerable, prodded at, shot at. . . . Arrows,
barbed with curious and unwarranted knowledge, saved up
from the days of the cradle, and tipped with rancour, fell

The Flurried Years 157

my way. The law of England, supported by orders,
summonses, and petitions, lay heavy on us both. I
wonder how many times we resorted to the Consul at
Frankfort to sign this or that — he or I ? Fate was
very hard on him — first the Review, then the children.
After that January of 191 1 I do not think he ever
smiled much again.

He had lost one of the things he had loved best in
the whole of his life, his paper, and he was going
to lose the children. He would continue to fork out
something like two hundred a year for them, but no longer
would he have the right to suggest its expenditure,
dictate their little policies, sympathise with their little
sorrows, make good certain nursery losses of credit, and
so forth. His Aunt Emma's oft-repeated doctrine that
the only way to keep his memory green in their minds
was to " give them things " found an echo in his own,
but when he was depressed he would admit that " it
was a purely unreasonable desire to keep one's memory
green, and not worth doing." But he jolly well tried to
do it.

His duties seemed to have resolved themselves into
that of paying. His payments were made with the
greatest regularity, involving in many cases, a consider-
able amount of mental stress. For suddenly to get a bill
with a long list of items addressed to you by a polite
Mother Superior, who is more than your social equal,
who appreciates you for what you are — a genius — and
sends you her best Christmas wishes, but who wants to
be settled with like any other creditor, only more so,
coming into the middle of a jaunt to Braunfels or Wetzlar,
which you open as you sit in a Biergarten with your glass of
Grosser Dunkles on the table beside you, having walked
miles through a trackless German forest, is sufficiently
discrepant and upsetting. But — chalk it up to him ! —
it was paid always on the nail, big accounts and little

158 The Flurried Years

accounts, holiday funds, doctors' bills, clothes accounts,
down to the smallest details of toothbrushes and hair-
ribbons — cars, pony-traps . . . but that came later, and
was the very devil !

His only consolation, and I rubbed it in as often as I
could — if people would only rub in consolations as they
rub in disagreeables ! — that the children were being
brought up in his own special religion, as expressly
stipulated, was certainly present. He had been received
into the Church himself when he was in Paris, a boy of
eighteen. I think the charms of the Father who pre-
pared him, and the picturesqueness of it all, were what
appealed to the poet. He had the greatest dislike to the
ugliness of Anglicanism — the inartistic compounding
with the anomalies of the confused service, three in one,
held in a building whence The Rood has been taken
down by the immediate ancestors of those who are
sitting there, in deadly opposition to their still earlier
ancestors, those of the Old Faith, who have been butchered
and gibbeted for it. The compromise of high churchi-
ness, of which he had naturally seen a great deal, was
his horror.

I was jealous of the children, for I was so often sacrificed
to them. He thought it was the other way :

" Chalk that up to me if I have been a bear lately."

He wrote on a literary matter to D. H. Lawrence in
what " D. H." called his new " Jove-abdicated-in-disgust
tone," and afterwards commented on to me :

"He is really such a lot better fellow than he thinks
he ought to be, to belong to this shabby state of things,
but he daubs his dove-grey kindliness with a villainous
selfish tar, and hops forth a very rook among rooks,
but his eyes, after all, remain like the Shulamite's,
dove's eyes."

I shall always love D. H. Lawrence for that, though
I never see him, and I think the worthiest action of Joseph

The Flurried Years 159

Leopold's life was recognition of his genius, and Lawrence's
practical help of prompt publication which the editor of
a review could give. He printed him in chunks, and
" D. H." was charmingly grateful for la moindre des
choses.

I made up my mind to go and beat up the Paris
relations for myself. Emile Guilleaume, as weU as being
a doctor, could tell fortunes by the cards. The cards
were against me ; still, we decided to go to Agnes Farley's
in Paris for the week-end. Joseph Leopold wrote to his
cousin and announced our arrival. Perhaps the letter
was not tactful, for I saw one specimen of the corre-
spondence when I got back. It ran :

" Be more correct in your expressions."

I went to see the rich banker in the Rue de Coq. He
approved of me. But he was an ardent religionist, and
built Catholic churches, and had married his daughter
to the Due de Tancarville, and wrote from the beautiful
castle of that name on the Seine.

And while I was there my own poor heart was pierced.
The Beauty went and married herself without telling
me. It was not her fault. She did not mean to be unkind.
She was " sweetly " religious, and had been forbidden
by her earthly father to write to me. Well, well ! With
tears in my eyes, so queerly unsuitable in Paris, where I
think I have never in my life, anywhere, in any place,
seen a French woman in such a state, I went and bought
her a porte bonheur at Loucher's. It was civilly acknow-
ledged one statutory week after the honeymoon. Brides
are not supposed to attend to their purely social obliga-
tions until that period of grace has supervened.

Rose Le Quesne, the artist, took us to the Bal Bullier,
vhere we watched the new dances, the Tango and the
Fox-Trot and the Bunny Hug . And we went to the Moulin

160 The Flurried Years

de la Galette where, years ago, when I was living in
Paris, Arnold Bennett and I used to sit by the hour at
a little china table on iron legs, a I'ecart of the
dancers, sipping our rhum St. James, watching the
hatless midinettes of the morning hours taking their
soulful pleasure of the night. It was beautiful. Passion-
ate, pale-faced, weary, dead-eyed, they hung like
creepers, only their feet moving, on the shoulders of
their partners, their miches of one evening perhaps ! We
would single out, Arnold Bennett and I, as they came
round and round again past our table, the dancers who
looked most utterly " gone." He serious, determined, a
temporary rock of fidelity ; she pamee. in her plain black
dress and black hat of daily use, but delicately, sensibly
shod always. Distinguished, all of them !

And Joseph Leopold went by himself to Les Ambassa-
deurs in the open air — and came home and wrote " All
the Dead," about a vision he had had on the Hunnen
Grabe, the Champs Elysees of Giessen, . . . the Germanic
warriors rising, clasping to their iron breastplates the
German maidens that have lain buried with them for
the last thousands and thousands of years. That is the
funny way poems come !

And we lunched with Arnold Bennett and his new
wife in the Rue de Grenelle, and, cynically, as a great
luxury, they treated us to an English leg of mutton and
potatoes and greens.

And back to Emile Guilleaume's " I told you so ! "
The night after, in a car rolling along moonlit roads to
Verviers Junction, where we parted, Joseph Leopold
back to 29 Nordanlage, whose horrors, from his conversa-
tion, I already began dimly to envisage, and I to Calais
— for England.

It was the night mail I took ; I was too ill for the
four-hour Ostend passage, which the Belgians obstinately,
by fair means or foul, tried to make one use. As we

The Flurried Years 161

reached Brussels a look at my watch convinced me that
I should not be allowed to " make the connection." I
confided my anxiety to the carriageful of Belgians, who
admitted it was hopeless, and that I should have to sleep
in Brussels. A gentleman sitting opposite me, who had
been profuse in civilities since Verviers, kept saying :
" Let me . . . you must come to The Midi ... it is
the best ..." I put him off politely ; the ladies in the
carriage seemed to think I should have considered myself
lucky. ... I hoped a chasseur from some one of the
big hotels at Brussels would be meeting the train. But
it was eleven o'clock, the lights were dim, and, as far as
I could see, there was not a soul on the platform. The
wretched man got out too, and would not leave me ;
he was insistent. Without answering him, my eyes
played round the station until I detected a cap with
some gold galon, and I rushed at it. Gold Galon said
Hotel de Saxe — the very hotel that Aubrey Beardsley used
to stay at and draw ! I went with the chasseur, and the
gentleman went in the other direction, saying indignantly
over his shoulder, " I leave you to your fate." He meant
the relative status of the hotel, which he imagined would
appal me. It was not an hotel ; it was a buvette — with
bedrooms, or, perhaps, one bedroom. The room into
which I was ushered, with its leering volutes and hideous
bellyings of brown mahogany, intimately reminded me of
a Beardsley drawing. Some yellow-white leno curtains
hid from me the lights and delights of Brussels. A candle-
stick was handed to me — the electric light had failed.
I had half a roll stuffed with ham in my bag. I ate it,
not the candle, both equally unappetising, and then got
into bed without a nightgown. The sheets were very
cool and clean, but presently . . . a noise . . . a rustling.
. . . Terrified, I was just going to rush out into the passage
when I remembered that I had no dressing-gown. While I

was putting on a few clothes a whitish cat came in through
Ly

162 The Flurried Years

the leno curtains and purred and made friends with me.
I found a spot of whiskey in my flask, and slept like a log
with the cat on the bed. It was like being at home. In
the morning I wondered if my pound would run to a
breakfast as well as my night's lodging ? When I paid,
however, with the tip for the chasseur who was going
to take me to the station, there seemed enough for a
petit dejeuner, with twopence over. Downstairs the
woman of the house, who was washing the parquet, gave
me something to eat — going on with her washing and
moving my chair round and round so that it should not
impede her ministrations. . . .

I contrived to send Joseph Leopold a line from Brussels
to tell him what had happened. He just acknowledged
it, and did not even enquire what sort of a night I had had.

At home it was what I had learned to call very unge-
heuer — rather like a Grimm fairy-tale. My mother was
stowed away in her own " apartments " ; the servants
were in the basement. I used to meet on the stairs one
or other of my sisters coming to visit my mother, passing
them in silence. Some iron did enter into my soul.
But still it was very like an Ibsen or a Chekov play.

The only thing certain is — uncertainty. At least, I'm
sure it may be so in Germany. The letters I got ran on
permutations of mood. When the wheel was on the
upturn it was a Paean ; a Jeremiad it was after I had left
him. Delays ! Of course — what did he expect ? And
lawyers " fencing voluptuously with commas " in Eng-
land and Germany both ! Long inconclusive interviews
with the authorities, " who keep on raising obstacles for
the mere pleasure of doing so."

The number of excuses being put up " are simply im-
measurable ; why, it takes three months here to dispose
of a pickpocket who, in your country, would be done with
in a day." He was already a German.subject, anyhow ;

The Flurried Years 163

he had yet to become a citizen of the town of Giessen.
Now they want proofs of his connection with this rich
and honourable family whose name he bears. . . .
" Will you send an old writing-case, reddish, Russian
leather . . . with silver clasps ? from Holland Park
Avenue ? " And all mixed up with allusions to the other
preoccupation — Love ! " It's tragic, it's absurd, it's
ridiculous, but there it is ! " . . . The Jamesian cadences
smote my ear. I was astonished that the so faithful
disciple did not insert " wonderfully " before the last
word ! Allusions to " stomachic uproar owing to Mrs.
Braun's cooking," requests for " pants and vests " that
were not forthcoming . . . collar measurements. . . . All
this was antithesis — Browningesque — and I did not mind.

He was simply ineffably bored, and dying to be in
London. My account of Gwen Otter's dinner of all les
nevroses, and of Frank Harris, my neighbour, sending
away all Gwen's beautiful viands and preferring to munch
dry biscuits out of a paper bag, which he crumbled all over
the cloth and offered to me and H. G., who sat on my
other hand, in his interesting fingers, seemed to make
Joseph Leopold long to be there.

Why was I so calm, so pleased to be away from him ?
I answered that if my mother died I would go to him at
once, and leave what he derisively called my home. I
had no " equanimity," only a grim determination to
second his efforts to acquire pax Germanica. I knew
that complainings from me would bring him back in a
moment, ruin him and the hope of that pax, and that
hard work and sticking to it would mean money, and that,
even for the things of the spirit, one must have money ?
And so my counsels to be civil to publishers, and not sit
starving on a high horse while the foot-people picked up
jennies.

He reassured me. Gloom had not quite stopped his
productiveness. He was " shoving L.W.B.E. along good

164 The Flurried Years

and strong, and working double tides at the ' Rems.' '
But he could hardly keep his eyes open, and there were
leaden weights on all his limbs. It was bitterly cold —
eight degrees of frost all day — and snow falling all the
time. His future countrymen called it normal, and liked
it. The atrocious prospect, the hideous rooms and
uneatable cookery, the silence, and the rest of it —
" things that seem funny when they are only temporary,
but become portentous when they put on an aspect of
permanence." Giessen was worse than Brixton, where
at least I could go and see him once a week. But he
would be strong ; Giessen might kill him, but he would
not give in. He would, with my leave, weigh on me with
all the weight with which Giessen bore on him, and I
must bear it. The change became so marked that even
Mr. Lawrence inveighed against what he found in Joseph
Leopold's letters — " the grin-and-bear-it, ironic attitude,
which is just so much grin foisted off on folk, and no
one thanks you ! " and advised him, when afflicted, to
" howl shamelessly to the ever-attentive heavens." And
he did ! I was more attentive than the firmament,
I fancy.

He had to sit tight, for any day the Ministry might
summon him.

There were, I made out, three parties to the matter.
The Town Council, who did not like him, the State
Ministry, that wanted him, the judicial side — Landsgericht
Ami — neutral. The Ministerium ordered the Munici-
pality to accept him, and the Municipality were engaged
in offering objections. By Saturday, perhaps, when
the matter came up for final revision — it was always
final for the moment — they might accept him — and they
might not ! The Town Council had been " soundly
wigged by the State in the matter, and had now got their
backs up. ..."

And every now and again he admitted that he had

The Flurried Years 165

been extravagant and given Mrs. Braun and her revolu-
tionary, revolting cookery a " miss," and had gone out
and dined well at Hettler's or the Bahnhof. So, as the
result of a decent meal, the liver was better, the mercurial
disposition asserted itself. " The excellent John says
there is every chance of the authorities recognising me
soon . . . and if they don't I shall appeal to the
Emperor. . . ." " John says the authorities have already
favourably reported me to the Grand Duke — the
man we met in Nauheim. He's at Darmstadt, where
he plays the democratic potentate who walks about
and drinks beer with his subjects. I may have to
go to Darmstadt. ..."

He worked like a nigger at calling on these people who
liked him ; " They would feter me if I allowed it." There
is the terrible doctor of philology who drives him mad
with Grimm's Law and mediaeval roots ; there is old
Salzmann, " who fastens on me like a leech," there are
students' parties at a Professor's which will kill him.
And dinners with the Rechtsanwalt and his wife, " amia-
ble, but too busy to be any good socially — tired, nervous,
over- worked people both."

This nervousness he considered to be a decided feature
of German mentality at that time when all Germany
was not so much planning a French invasion as dreading
a " try on " for the recovery of the lost provinces, that
fetish which, as my mother said, " stood between the
French and their wits." A sense of imminence, procuring
the usual nerves and dyspepsia. These people were
martyrs to it. John was, witness his red, bumped-out
cheeks, his shiny, tight forehead, his breathlessness, his
little punctuating groans. It is the national curse. And
they work off some of its minor immediate effects every
year with regularity, spending a month in some Kur or
other as a matter of course, for business, not pleasure.

They do not, as we English do for fun, disobey the

166 The Flurried Years

orders of their Geheimrath. Fun ! There is no fun
in Germany, only Simplicissimus, the Punch of this
nation, quite unintroduceable — so different from our
advertised little gentleman — into the drawing-room,
or even the home. It lies on the tables at Markese's
in Marburg and such little restaurants, where the men
go to drink tea and coffee in glasses after dinner. The
Kaiser in its pages permits himself to be foully abused
and made a cockshy of under the crust of coarseness.
He is wise — or was wise. It acted, I suppose as a
detente for his loving and patient people.

As for the Judge in his forthcoming cause, Joseph
Leopold had him well in hand ; gave him an English
lesson once a week, rubbing in the idea during the rests
that he sincerely desired to be an inhabitant of his
horrid town — which he did not, exactly — and perhaps
that was why the gentleman seemed, as Joseph Leopold
admitted, slightly sceptical of his desire. Such a thing
the formal German official had never heard of in a
Briton before, the reverse being so steadily the rule.
So he is not much flattered at the earnestness of Joseph
Leopold to become his fellow-townsman, for he thinks
there must be a catch in it ! Giessen is " gut enoff," but
hardly pleasant. And Joseph Leopold, unable to present
it with a new pump or a new town hall or a new barracks,
is conscious that it is up to him to persuade them that
he is just a quiet, unthinking, bon vivant, frequenting the
officers' mess, fairly prosperous (as they have an eye to
taxes), throwing money — not too madly — about, and,
installing one of the actresses as his maitsesse en titre,
managing to appear " politically undangerous."

That was the rub. Socialism ! Germany's bugbear
and menace, the staff of Junkerdom ! He knew that if
they were to discover in him the slightest trace of that-
virus all was up. But they would not, of course. The

The Flurried Years 167

Police knew all there was to know, and they could not
be taken in. The Police was the reason why I was told
so little, it was their spying that, said Joseph Leopold, so
" limited his powers of expression," for he was a shy man.
Apart from sentiment, I kept asking him for sensible
letters, sensible three times underlined. I found out when
he came to England in May, and not till then, the nature
of one of the obstacles he spoke of. They wanted an
undertaking from him that, when he was adopted as a
citizen, he would live actually in the town of Giessen.

Jamais de la vie ! He had thought and talked of a
villa on the Rhine, near Aunt Emma — a villa that could
be let for the summer, and where money, that Germans
adore, would be his for the asking and a little deference
and kowtowing to an ancient and influential relative.
Once admitted to civic privileges, he would keep his
promise to Aunt Emma and take up the family title,
now in abeyance, and recover the large entailed estates
in Prussia that were his by inheritance — near the Lune-
burger Heide — where there is the ghost story. . . .

The desire for money ! A good fence for the German
relations, but really peace. Peace ! I wanted it. I
wanted, the moment my mother died, to get out of the
country that held the Beauty, turned unkind, Goneril
and Regan, not to speak of others uncongenial and
disagreeable to me. Marwood wanted him to get a foreign
correspondentship in Paris. He knew four languages.
And, if it could not be Paris, a house at Aix-la-Chapelle,
or at Montjoie, that fantastic little opera-bouffe village
just across the border, or Malmedy whence he could
run over and see the Guilleaumes. All the smart Spadois
had villas in Germany. All the Germans who did
business in Belgium — and there are hundreds of them —
had town houses in Verviers or Pepinster or on the
wooded heights of Spa ; little red-brick villas that you
can see for miles, like Wendy's house in the woods.

168 The Flurried Years

We had both taken London en grippe, but in my heart
of hearts I knew it would be London in the end — at any
rate, London for six months of the year. Joseph Leopold
had the social instinct so thoroughly developed. He
was no " sticker " — alas !

And then the question of impressing assumed enormous
proportions, and he was getting ill, dying, down there in
the marsh where the storks flew about and nested on
unsanitary roofs. He must get up on the hill where the
University buildings are. It looked so bad for the Judge
to call on him and find him living in a pigstye, with a
passage smelling of drains, and having to go through the
bedroom to get to the sitting-room. Here was he, trying
to impress this man with his eminence, and the man
replies. " Why, then, is he living in a room that a poor
student wouldn't think of ? " What Joseph Leopold
wanted was a place where he could exhibit some
possessions of his own, not the landlady's, and have a
table on which to put a dinner, ordered in — plates and
spoons and all — from an hotel, " the way every bachelor
in Giessen lives who is above the rank of a student."

" Just consider what an odd figure a German similarly
situated would make in England, where they gossip as
they do here ! All John can say in my defence is that
I am eccentric, and I daresay that is true enough, but
it won't do. The police here enquire into every stick of
furniture in the house, and all is registered in the central
office for the authorities to consult when they want to."

He would add :

" And you — you are one of those wonderful people, so
Mrs. Prothero says, that can actually see what you don't
want to see ! Can't you see this ? Or is it one of your
crises of irresistible instinct that it would be cruel of
me to override ? "

No, only I "knew my Pappenheimer."

The flat, he said, must be Unfurnished. He could

The Flurried Years 169

have furniture for £100, the seller taking it back at the
end of the year for £80. He had seen a flat — the police
had found out he wanted one — damned impertinent
German police ! — for £20. He was already paying Mrs.
Braun £26 a year, a shilling a day for coal and light. . . .

What I was afraid of was, precisely, Unfurnished rooms.
I up and begged him in a letter to take a Furnished flat,
even scantily furnished, and we could supplement it.
No ! He might as well give up what John wanted him
to do at once. He had spent a precious week in making
enquiries. . . . "What am I to do? What?" Why
had I taken the responsibility of keeping him alive ?
Having done so, I must now persevere and repair my
crossing of the terrible finality of his arrangements a
year ago. He supposed I wanted to break his spirit ?
Oh, yes, I was breaking his spirit all right by my crushing
and convincing expose of ways and means ; the only
argument that a person of his philosophy could oppose
was this, that while one is gathering the ways and garner-
ing the means one is spending the good years, and he'd
leave it till he heard from me again.

I am afraid I paltered with the issue — it was perhaps
far more serious than I thought. This prying of the
German police that he was dinning into me was perhaps
to blame. And perhaps I shall be arraigned before the
Bar of the Heavenly Academy of Letters for thus preach-
ing down with a horde of little maxims the heart of one
of its most hopeful members.

I could not hear the languid, plangent tenor over the
water, but I am sure that its tones would have frayed my
heart's strings to tatters.

" Do, for heaven's sake, wire what you honestly want.
This sort of thing is getting too distracting. I must
arrange by Monday week. ..."

I sent a long, costly telegram to the effect that he must
take a flat — furnished or unfurnished, as he thought

170 The Flurried Years

proper. And why did he defer to my opinion so ? How
could I honestly want anything ? I knew nothing but
what he told me ; I could not judge.

" I honestly just want you to do what you can that
will get the German citizenship. I certainly thought
at first that that would come automatically after
five months' domicile — is that the right word ? You
see how uninstructed I am and how easily I can muddle
you and myself. Take no more notice of anything
I write of a carping or enquiring nature. This is
really final, for, when I don't know what I am talking
about, I am no good. Brush my opinion aside ; you
are the man on the spot. What did the woman say
last year at Fleckhardt's Hohe ? Don't be unter den
Pantoffel ! Nobody wants you to be."

And this astonishing man wrote next day :

" Of course, since it upsets you, I must give up the
idea of unfurnished rooms. You don't appreciate how
important it is ! "

And the next letter :

" Have practically settled to take furnished rooms
again, kept by a waiter who was for three years at
the Criterion, and understands the better what one's
needs are. So let your spirit be at rest. ... It wasn't
a frivolous device for spending money . . . but, of
course, you will not be able to see that and will always
be in panics over the idea of expenditure."

Expostulations ! And the reply :

" Of course you shall have your way about every-
thing. You always do, you know."

More expostulations ! And :

" Darling, I have taken furnished rooms, so that's
over. You do bedevil me so."

1911

Second Year of Exile — More favourable attitude of the A uthorities — Joseph
Leopold as usual sanguine — My visit to Giessen — Joseph Leopold's
mother as chaperon and housekeeper — No Storks — The Johns, first
impressions — He and She and the Tertium Quid — Captain Walloth and
The Harem Skirl — My Distrust — Joseph Leopold's Confidence — German
veneration of Wilde and Galsworthy — / feed it — Giessen Society's
Reception of me — Paying Calls in German — " Dumb Crambo " ditto —
Visit of the Johns to England — Business and Pleasure — The Coronation
and Mr. Lloyd George — The Germans and Mr. W. J. Locke — His
Great Dane and my Bulldog — Mr. W. H. Hudson, Mr. Bernard Shaw
and my Owl — Return of Joseph Leopold to Exile — Too Frivolous for the
Germans — Neglecting the Main Object — The Children again — Good
News at last — Too Casual Intimation — Insist on Formal Assurance —
Get it — The Johns sinister — War Rumours — Threatened Railway
Strike — To Paris all the same — Congratulatory Letters from Mrs. Ward
and Conrad — Plans — A House — A Grave on the Schiffberg — Henry
James on Mr. Guggenheim — Gare de I'Est and the Rainbow over Rheims.

By March he had moved and was getting in. He was
sitting on the balcony in the sun. He was rushing his
book through at a tremendous rate. The German papers
were full of a book called Ancient Lights. Mimi had sent
him the Coblentzer one, hailing him as the Prodigal Son
who is about to re-enter the Fatherland. The funny thing
was that the father was the prodigal, old Franz Huff er, who
shook off the dust of Germany, so odious to his artistic
and enlightened mind, as long ago as the seventies.

And then we took a holiday in England and went down
to Inchmery to stay with Lady De La Warr, where he
played bridge all night till ten with my lady and her
daughter and a nice Catholic priest. Poor Father Consett
had always to get up and leave the game at ten sharp —
some obscure rule common to the religion of three of the
party. And then, after a good chunk of the season's

171

172 The Flurried Years

joys, Joseph Leopold took his mother back to Giessen.

The authorities were, I understand, much impressed
by his move. The handsome flat, his mother there to
give it the semblance of a general home, paying calls for
him, trotting about with little Mrs. John ; and, in about
a month, I was invited over.

I had bought a harem skirt. Those dictators of fashion,
the buyers, were attempting to lancer this charming and
sensible garment. I for one wish they had succeeded.
He wrote :

"It will be good business if you bring the harem
skirt ; the whole town is agog about this new fashion,
I find, and I will ask some local swells in to tea to see
you in it. Bring Chandler. He'd be no use, but I'd
love to show him the exquisite Bahnhof Restaurant
here and what caterers can do."

Of course I didn't bring Chandler, though he would
have enjoyed it.

Giessen is a junction, a very smart junction, decorated
art nouveau, like the rest of Germany. The roof is frescoed
with wild flowers, and electric lights, in the form of
campanulas, are hung in elegant festoons on long, thin,
metal cords like organ pipes. The sandwiches like dreams
and the beer like beer — and that is saying a good deal !

Joseph Leopold's flat was on the first floor and newly
built — scaffolding poles still about it. It looked very
imposing, and no place for storks. His man, a waiter
at the Bahnhof, and his wife, lived in. She cooked and
Rabich valeted Joseph Leopold. They slept on a bed
in the kitchen — a monstrous one, their own, like one of
those beds that James I or Mary Queen of Scots slept
in, boasted by nearly every historical mansion. We
were to have our meals there, but the mother of Joseph
Leopold had given up her pleasant room in the flat in
order to come and chaperon me in the Hotel Prinz

The Flurried Years 173

Heinrich. She took a stern view of her duties ; I don't
think that Easter I was alone with Joseph Leopold for
more than ten minutes.

It was a perfect rush of gaiety. Everyone called :
professors and their wives, doctors and their wives, the
military especially, and the Chef de Gare, who was a
captain as well — useful " touch " this, thus to put the
Army at the head of the Transport ! Captain Walloth,
who came o' mornings and made his white Schimmel curvet
for my delectation under the windows, was one of your
strong, silent, fat men. I don't think I ever heard him
say much more than " Wie geht's Ihnen ? " and another
phrase. . . . For, next day, wearing my harem skirt, we
went to the Johns ; not a real call — calls are paid in the
morning — but to tea in a friendly way. Captain Walloth
was coming on purpose to see it — the Herr Rechtsanwalt
was going to steal a few moments from his work. . . .

Skirts were already so tight this year that it seemed
rather absurd to make such a fuss about a woman's
putting each leg in a separate trouser, as it were, when
she was ordinarily and every day putting both legs into
one. Indeed, in my nice new dress, as I went up Frau
John's easy, broad-stepped, oak staircase, I walked with
a sense of freedom very un-German-fraulike, and entered
the drawing-room where I was to be the guest of honour
— I and my hosen rock. . . .

There were large saddlebag chairs, and little tables
bearing the novels of John Galsworthy and H. G. Wells,
and on the wall, plates, and on the mantel, peacock's
feathers in the style recommended by Wilde. These
German people venerate his memory. When Dr.
Schiicking last year learned that I as nearly as possible
escaped the honour of being Mrs. Wilde, he treated me
with added respect.

Tea — stout tea — was spread in the dining-room.
Everyone was thinking of my dress. The Herr

174 The Flurried Years

Rechtsanwalt had come home earlier to see it. Captain
Walloth sat beside me, murmuring in a soft, luscious,
yet raucous whisper, " Hosen rock ! " Frau John said
she should not have known it was bifurcated if she had
not been told. Herr John was silent ... he already
saw the police on my track, requesting me to desist from
giving the natives of Giessen food for reflection and
animadversion. And so they did — next day.

I did not take to the Herr Rechtsanwalt. Was he
going to be the devil of the piece ? He was too like
Napoleon to be quite good. A sensitive, intelligent
mouth ... a fine head, yet he looked schlim . . . and
though his bill with regard to Bamberger, the " church-
chest-cheat " of Marburg, on whom I had employed
him last year, was low, that might have been a sprat
to catch a herring. At any rate, the large English
herring was now completely in his hands to make or
mar. In the light of events I do not see any cause to
reverse my first impression. He did not speak a word
of English. His wife — well, she was charming, but
her " slimness," in the slang sense of the word, jumped
to the eyes. She looked frivolous, and was deep. I
wondered what that bosom, covered with blue serge worked
in hieratical designs, hid of scheming and some racial
malice ? She was an uncommonly clever woman, was
Linchen, and against all women as a matter of course !
Nothing of the suffragette about her ! And she held
her husband, Captain Walloth and contemplated, doubt-
less, holding also Joseph Leopold in the hollow of her
little undistinguished hand. Joseph Leopold liked and
trusted them both. . . . His mother was less penetrated
with their virtues ; she had had a German husband.

And then they came to dinner at 15 Friedrichstrasse
the Johns and Captain Walloth and a couple of Herren
Professors and their wives, and we played " Dumb
Crambo " — and I did, too, in German ! Intimations of my

The Flurried Years 175

German nursery past helped me ; I had ever so little the
power of arranging sentences, and was not much worried
by the verb to be conveyed to the end of a very long one.
And next day people began to call. I keep some cards
— Wirkliche Geheimer Regierungs Rath and a Geborene
Freifrau von 0. . . . Joseph's mother and I duly returned
calls and accepted dinners. Successful dinners last
till four in the morning, and there is a continual coming
and going between the dining-room and the salon
till then. The last stage is beer. Beer in the small
hours ! There are also invitations to " Roulette and
Bowie." Bowie is a very nice strong mixture of spices and
Rhine wine that would put anyone not to the manner
born under the table — and one night put Herr John.
He was bothered. They played high — Joseph Leopold
had a martingale — and Linchen did not at all like her
man to lose money to his client. I enjoyed it. It was
the other way sometimes, and then I didn't. In the
day, walks, excursions to the Hunnen Graben and the
Schiffberg, and many a Biergarten, along with the
streaming populations getting out of the town on Sundays
and holidays.

And then it was time for me to go home. But it was
not good-bye. They were, Herr Walloth and all, coming
to England next month to combine business with pleasure,
see Marwood and Mary, Mr. Chandler, and the King of
England crowned.

All this time I was being told, like Bluebeard's wife,
not to go queering any pitches by the exhibition of
unfeminine curiosity. I must on no account pump
Herr John, or ask him how the naturalisation was going
on. How could I have ? " Dumb Crambo " was all
very well, but a legal term would have been utterly
beyond my German.

The visit to England was fatal to poor Herr Walloth's
peace of mind, thinned him considerably, and made

176 The Flurried Years

him rather spiteful. English cookery and love ! I could
not, of course, put them up. My house was like a
beleaguered city, full of consignes and stipulations.
Goneril was averse to meeting me or Joseph Leopold
when she came to see my mother, and at last got her
lawyer to arrange that we should remain sealed in an
inner room till her progress up the stairs had been
accomplished. She would announce her visits, like
Royalty. But Mary Martindale, alone in the flat, since
Joseph's mother had remained at Giessen at her priestly
task of impressing the authorities, came to our assistance
and took the Germans in. Herr Walloth, large, gay dog,
took a room at The Russell, but daily hung about the flat
or about my house where Mary was, murmuring, " Wie
gehts Ihnen !;" in luscious tones that reminded me of
Giessen. They all dined with me once or twice to meet
English people. I forget who. May, I think, and Mr.
Hudson and Dr. Westlake. Linchen possessed no evening
toilette, and I offered to lend her one. She insisted on
buying it — a ten guinea gown for two pounds ten — and I
soon saw why. She had " roofed it in." A modest Ger-
man Frau does not unveil except in the harem.

They saw the Coronation. Mary took them to Windsor
and I took them to Oxford. Mr. and Mrs. W. J. Locke,
in their bungalow at Cholsey, offered the Germans
hospitality, and we took my bulldog, full of poison,
though we knew it not. A week ago he had bitten the
milkman, who had retaliated on the dog by a dollop of
meat saturated with red lead. I had been a little afraid
of Mr. Locke's very Great Dane, but Roy was too languid
to close with him, and lay all the afternoon on a rug on
the lawn while we went on to Oxford. He died next day.

And before the Germans left we took a car and showed
them English country. And, while I and Mary went to
see Conrad, Joseph Leopold and Herr John went to see
Mr. Marwood at Stowting, who was then really too ill

The Flurried Years 177

to see anyone, but stretched a point to oblige Joseph
Leopold. Marwood spoke German — any language in-
deed. And the Johns, having sat with me in Sir Henry
Synge's stand in Whitehall, and having seen me and
Joseph Leopold walking about in the vast-looking
space formed by the street cleared for the Royal carriages,
standing cheek by jowl with my old friend Mr. Lloyd
George, who talked to me pleasantly, though I verily
believe he thought I was someone else, as these Big Wigs
will, returned to Germany, well pleased with their
entertainment, and their minds properly full of the
importance of Joseph Leopold in the sorry scheme of
things. Herr Walloth was pleased, too, because, though
Mary would have none of him, she went back to Germany
with the Johns and he would see her every day.

Roy had died, and now Ann Veronica went. Mr.
Hudson was deeply distressed about her, and meeting
Mr. Bernard Shaw coming back from Hampstead,
so distraught was I that I tried to engage his sym-
pathies, chattering through the rattle of the noisiest
part of the Tube. I did engage them, I thought ; he
listened to my lament in the kindest way in the world.
I had carried Ann Veronica about all day like a baby
in my two hands, and, after she died, had an autopsy
made, and found the bone sticking in her gullet. She
had not eaten for days. No, there were no white splashes
on the floor of the cage. ..." Died of exhaustion,"
I understood Mr. Shaw to say as he went off to the
discussion of something else that interested him, i.e.,
German Divorce Law. I judged that a new problem
play was on the tapis.

So like Bernard Shaw's contrariness, for Germany and
things German were not precisely in good odour just
then, and, indeed, every perceptible odour in the world
was vile ! We were in for a hot July — it was the year

My

178 The Flurried Years

191 1, when heat and drought drove men mad, caused
the cattle that supported them to be lean and perish,
filled the Courts with murder and rapine, inflamed Strike
committees, and incensed three nations to the verge of
war for want of a little rain that might have staunched
their hissing hatreds.

One evening, as I sat in the little garden at Brook
Green with the sister of Joseph Leopold, a man called
Springfield who did odd jobs for her, came running
along the railings on the green, to us, sitting under the
one black tree with the pale gas-lamp behind, and with
every sign of perturbation repeated a message from
Mrs. Hyndman to her husband, both political characters.
It was that all the German waiters in London, armed to
the teeth, were massing in the big hotels, refusing to
wash dishes, but ready to attack under their colonels,
acting under sealed orders these long years past.
Waiters, of course, are all conscripts. . . . We went
on sitting there. Dr. Soskice, perhaps, knew his
Pappenheimer.

But we women, in that dusk hour of helpless surmise,
sitting in a backwater of Hammersmith, did not consider
the message so very wild. Mr. Hyndman might or
might not be elfishly attempting to poser un lapin to
his old friend. These people who, through political
intelligences connected with their own businesses, were
" in the know," knew that a crisis, " dark and damnable "
— as George Wyndham said, who also was in the know —
was brewing, and that War, engineered in Chancelleries,
might easily break out in the Pantry. In 1908 we were
very near war. In 1910 eighty-four thousand conscripts
were quartered in Trier, a frontier town. What about
Prince von Billow's article, which Joseph Leopold
translated, and which appeared, I think, in the Morning
Post long before I thought of him ? And what about
Metternich, Joseph Leopold's friend, staying at Wynyard

The Flurried Years 179

in that year, along with the editor of The Times, my
friend, and the obvious sort of a crisis that was on then,
when the Prince chartered a motor during the dinner-
hour, to the great annoyance of Lady Londonderry,
and was driven to Darlington to catch a train south?
Already then the Germans were making mischief in
Morocco and Bulgaria, and telling the transparent lies
which are such a feature of German diplomacy and
futility at home and abroad. I have never found a
German he hold water.

But, anyhow, there was no mention in the papers next
day of anything of the sort.

I was still ill, worn, carped at, criticised, hopelessly
overdrawn on my mother's behalf, trying to fill up the
deficit with my own earnings. And Joseph Leopold
would not let me do journalism — an aristocratic pre-
judice of the future Count von Aschendrof. And he
was not minding his job. The two poets — his lightsome
secretary Ezra and he — seemed to be spending their
time in rushing about the duchy that he desired to adopt
him, and other duchies, in cars. ... At Homburg and
Nauheim, where a great charmer was . . . escorting
her sister to specialists, being very kind, and enjoying
himself hugely.

And he had talked to me so much of the importance
of convincing Authorities, of the necessity of being there,
tres range, sitting good and proper in his drawing-room
when burgomasters called ! When — when was the
naturalisation going to get itself made ? Surely sky-
larking about the Duchy was a mark of frivolity that
would disgust Their Profundities ?

It sounded jealous — alas !

And then the other, perhaps less reasonable, jealousy
became a factor in the situation. I came up against the
Children. There was a good deal to excuse me. Joseph
Leopold was ordered riding exercise by the doctor, and

180 The Flurried Years

denied himself for the sake of the expense. My novel
was returned from America — nothing doing ! And there
was a bill of his falling due for payment in August. Ach
du lieber Augustin. Alles ist hin ! Geld certainly
seemed to be hin, and there suddenly came the cool
request for a pony and trap for the children to go to
church in during the holidays. That set the match to
me. It was the last straw. Gently but firmly — the
horrid, usual way of The Stinge with a strong sense
of past generosities — I wrote and desired him to say that
he really could not afford it — these holidays, at any rate.
The deluge of words that followed, of cruel felicities of
speech, apt verbal lunges — le mot juste, indeed, applied
to a palpitating, shrinking Mentor at home ! I wrote —
not said ; there was the rub — fiercely that I didn't hate
the children or their existence, but that I had a certain
tendency to put him — or even myself — first, and could
not think of their menus plaisirs till he was out of this
nerve-racking wood. And I did so, of my nature, hate
insolvency, even temporary :

"It is just the chance of my Victorian upbringing
and its attendant fetiches. You jolly Ancient Lighters
lived and wallowed quite happily in debt. My mother
walked miles to save a twopenny 'bus fare so as to be
able to afford the very best blankets. I have never
been in debt in my fife, or known anybody who was.
When I was a child, two pawn-tickets fell out of the
pocket of a coat left in the hall by Theo Marzials, and
the maid brought them in on a plate to my mother
as if she scorned to touch them. The idea of debt
stands at my bedside like a spectre. I am upset even
now at my mother's account being unavoidably over-
drawn. You seem able to bear the sense of debt ;
the place in which the shoe pinches you is where it
curbs your public generosity.

The Flurried Years 181

"... Yes, I do often think of the injury to the
children of being deprived of a father's care, but I
don't feel as if a treat here and there or a pony-cart is
any compensation. I scorn your Aunt Emma's panacea
for forgetfulness of you — if they do forget. Bless
me, they're always writing to you !

"... Yes, I am fierce, and fierce enough to go on
being called stingy. Think ! Really to-day I gave
half a crown to a poor, crocky mother selling matches
at a street corner with a baby unweaned in her arms.
Chalk that up to me!"

I would not write — for a space at least. And then
came pathetic reminders of exile that vanquished my
pert and absurd resistance. One overwhelmed me :

" What ever you do or don't say or keep silent about,
don't, don't Not Write. For there are cruelties and
refinements of cruelties, but, however cruel you are
to me in words, I would rather have it than silence.
For you must remember, you must believe, that what-
ever you are or you aren't, you are the only link I have
with the visible world."

So on and so on, the voice of the charmer, and I verit-
ably believe that the charm displayed, so far as I am
concerned, was what the vulgar call " the gift of the
gab," and the intelligent — " style." That useful trick of
style at the service of all communications, verbal or
otherwise, from one soul to another. The cunning use
of inflections when the subject to be influenced is at hand ;
in absence, the perfectly balanced sentence, the due
pathos, the almost biblical English, the note well struck,
with leisurely pauses suggesting deep-lying, sub-penetra-
tive emotion, do as well.

Of course, I didn't Not Write. I broke the embargo.
He was childishly glad of it ; love of me, some of the
joy of the artist in the true cleverly brought off. ... He

182 The Flurried Years

had told me so plainly that what I had done was unforget-
table and unforgivable, and now, to soothe me, he
observed amiably that he had forgotten and forgiven.
So, from me :

" If my silence makes you wretched — well, I'll write,
and for God's sake don't tell me that I am the noblest
woman in the world. And don't be ' resigned,' please !
Do you think your phrase, ' It's the will of God ! '
comforts me much ? ... It is all right for you ; you
are clever enough not to worry about these
things. . . ."

He didn't, or he wouldn't, show it. The meagre
sentence in Ancient Lights, his casual reference to my
awful night in Brussels, his theory that when he came
to England it wasn't to see me but ' to walk my dog,"
his determined ellipsis of emotional phrases that he used
to attempt to put down to official prying which was
" limiting to his powers of expression ! " And when he
didn't write fulsomely about my health it was because,
forsooth, with a sort of artistic prudery, he " disliked
writing the obvious."

So when I got two letters with news that to me was
like the coming out of chloroform to find the tooth out
and in the waste-paper basket, I kept very calm, and
considered ways and means.

" John seems to think it is all right now about the
naturalisation — though of course they may take it back
if I don't sit tight enough here to show them I am
stable, or my pass-book doesn't look opulent." And
later, " John says it is absolutely certain now. Isn't
it jolly ? "

Jolly, yes ; but I insisted on quite a formal statement
from him, and got it.

A railway strike was threatened. The men were to go

The Flurried Years 183

out at eight o'clock. Their temper was bad. The man who
sold him ice, Chandler said, and chopped it, had a revolver
in the other hand. Chandler was very down generally.
He was a bit of a speculator, and had lost a thousand
pounds in the New Gallery fiasco. He adored Joseph
Leopold, and was deeply disappointed at not having
gone to Germany, for he would have liked the jaunt.
But he was my very good friend, and said that we should
not want for food so long as he had a shop. The
temporary nurse I had for my mother departing could
not get her box through the strikers, and had to leave
it at Paddington and go home with only her handbag.
How about mine to Dover ? I could not go on this
errand without some clothes to my back. I wrote that
I must defer it, that if the men did go out on Thursday
the whole thing, short of civil war, would be settled in
a week. I had great faith in my Mr. Askwith — the strike-
settler. But, if it wasn't really over, how could I leave the
little principality where I reigned ? Awful things might
happen any minute . . . there was a chance of famine.

My mother's doctor thought me so ill with heat and
dust that he was dying to get me off, and suggested I
should go to the Farleys in the Rue de la Paix, where I
should be near enough to be telegraphed for, and could
take cars. Nurse Heffer, the prude, the easily shocked,
was conscientious, and the only danger for the invalid
was want of food. All she got now was milk and eggs,
and she could be kept up on tea if need be. There was
the good Chandler. I could not procure milk for her,
and, as I ate meat, I was by way of being a useless mouth.
Things would grow dearer. And I was much weakened
by poor nourishment, water and vegetables failing . . .
streets unswept and unwholesome dust flying . . . these
things did not affect the invalid in her suite of apartments.

But how if it was mob rule over here ? Chandler
said that it was going to be awful. The doctor said

1 84 The Flurried Years

that I should be no good if it was awful, by which he
supposed that I and Chandler meant an attack by the
massed forces of Socialism, and I was more likely to be
a mark for frenzy than an old invalid lady.

It was just eight days to the twentieth. I settled to
go then, telling Joseph Leopold to await me in Paris
and begin letting Farley take all his teeth out.

I got off all right on the twentieth, though I was so
ill I could hardly stand, bearing two lovely letters of
encouragement from those doyens of my profession, Mrs.
Humphry Ward and Mr. Joseph Conrad, which were
worth their weight in gold to me at this juncture. Mary
A. Ward to " Dear Child." Her " regard for my father's
daughter " ! Conrad, dilating politely as he only knew
how upon my " services to literature " in the person of
his friend and the need of peace, with a capital letter for
that friend. And, best of all ghostly comfort, his own
letter in my pocket. Germany had accepted him, was
glad of him ; the burgomasters of the smug town of
Giessen, in Hesse Darmstadt, were in a fair way to
hang out flags for him. Schucking, his old friend at
Jena, where he went to lecture now and then, had
written to congratulate him and Germany. I remem-
bered Schucking when he stayed with me at South Lodge,
and how he never used his knife, but laid it on the side
of his plate and worked away with his fork, as it were
the flat of his sword, on his slices of cold sirloin. There
had been a big dinner at Hettler's and much wine had
flown. . . . Joseph Leopold speaking with his own grim
effect of world-resignation — " It's the Will of God ! " —
a favourite exclamation out of The Playboy — complained
that, on this wild occasion, only the Johns were silent, dour
as usual, conscientiously plugging away at their dinners.
. . . Perhaps the German pitfall was digged even then ?

But the attitude of these good people did not seem to
matter so much now. The point was that of Giessen.

The Flurried Years 185

It, apparently, was acclamation. Dear, kind Giessen !
Perhaps, he suggested, I might after all be thinking of
giving them a new pump ? We would live there at first,
and then, perhaps, a castle on the Rhine for next year,
when poor mamma. . . . We would have no more to do
with England, which had so plagued him for the last
three or four years, neither of us. England had now no
particular jurisdiction over him. All the law he ever
wanted again — and he hoped he wouldn't want any more
— he would go to Germany for. They were slow, but so
sure and so cheap. If he had a child it should be christ-
ened in Germany, at Giessen for choice — not Justus
Christ, though, like the local chemist where I used to go
to get my prescriptions made up. And he would be
buried — oh, on the hill of the Schiffberg, in the chapel
there. The inn at the Schiffberg where we were going,
with the real green boughs trained in wavy lines on the
whitewashed walls of the Saal, freshly cut every week till
it looked like a Morris wallpaper — the Evenlode. I
thought with a grim humour, which never deserts me
even if I would, of the famous envelope in my mother's
safe at home labelled " Our Grave." What about a plot
to be taken, somewhere near the Hunnen Graben, along
with the queer Hunnish dead that he had written about in
the poem, instead of the slavish populations of Woking ?
He had just seen a Senegalese actress in an open-air
kiosk in the Champs Elysees who had suggested the
" rice-pale queen " in his poem, and I was nearly as
pale through worry and waiting, though I did not eat
rice ! So and so much he wrote.

At the Gare du Nord he met me, toothless and feckless,
and attempted to see me through the Customs. He
had not a grinder in his head, and was still, perhaps for
this reason, a little " limited in expression." Farley
was putting him in crowns at eight pounds a head ;
it seemed to me that he could have inserted diamonds

1 86 The Flurried Years

at that rate, as he used to do for Australian millionaires
— a safe way to carry them about and get them through
the Customs. He was a trick dentist, famous for his
athletic stunts. It was said that he could take a tooth
out of your head and put it back again the wrong way
up. He was very appreciative of me, considering me
" a unit of some value," and joyously covered four of
my perfectly good teeth with gold crowns that another
dentist, ten years afterwards, has been kind enough to
yank off. Naturally, millionaires were his happy hunting
ground. The loss of the Titanic docked him of a thousand
a year through those good clients Messrs. Guggenheim
& Midler. " Served Gug right," Henry James said, for
travelling in a walking ville d'eau, that only wanted one
more attraction — a golf course !

Joseph Leopold had had the last six out yesterday. His
mouth yawned at me like a cave — but no, he wouldn't have
a temporary set ; it cost money ! A weird fit of economy !

And even so, with astonishing absence of vanity, and
I as crocky in my own way of illness as he, we went to-
gether into what was now — so I believed — his country.

Gare de l'Est — the ugliest station in Paris. He lost
a hundred-franc note on the floor in front of the booking-
office in the stress of taking tickets, and shook loudly
for fear of my displeasure. But, for once, I was in the
mood to be as gaspilleuse as he.

It rained and cleared — and rained again — all in the
same breath throughout that day, and in one great and
famous clearing, after a heavy shower, we wiped the
dim and glistening pane and saw among the blues and
yellows of the rainbow-making drops a phantom Cathe-
dral ... a graceful whiteness that meant spires and
pinnacles, far away, posed on the level plain. A cynosure
— a landmark — small, because of its great distance,
but so pathetic. . . . Rheims under the bow of heaven I

There is a lacuna here and I may not fill it lest it should
be said that I am representing myself to be what I then
considered I was in law — his wife. I have been taught
since that it was not so — that I never did become his legal
wife. So I write of what was in my mind then, and in
his, so far as I apprehended it, and of " Alles was dazu
mich trieb " . . . I got a few German words out of it all
and, what was more, the inhibition of personal egotism
for a space of strenuous years.

And now ; — " Excellency, a few goats ! "

PART II

1911-12

Things I Cannot Tell — Rheims again in the Dark — The Papers of Naturalisa-
tion— Lost or Strayed ? — Bellevue — Teeth — Mary's Hunting Aunt —
The Vintage — The Daily Something — The Belgian Frontier — The
Wind of the Flail — Mrs. Aria's Party — Marwood and Conrad.

The promise of the rainbow was not to be fulfilled.
We could not see the blood-red ray in the spectrum,
but Germany was all wrong with us ! I had felt it all
those three days. And coming back through industrial
regions flaring in the night, observing in the flash of
stations German names — directions — I asked Joseph
Leopold : Where were the papers ? The papers of
naturalisation and what not ? Couldn't I see them ?
It would soothe me, he could translate them by the
light of the little oil-lamp trembling on the roof.

Oh, yes, but he had left them with John. John had
got them all.

" Damn John ! " I said.

He said :

" Come, come, it's his business."

He hadn't seen Linchen at all this time, and only John
himself for a minute. He didn't care to have Linchen
see him without a tooth in his head. That was why we
hadn't dined with them, been near them even. There
were no papers to speak of ; only a big card with all his
history, past, present, and to come, written on it — a sort
of carte-de-civisne. John — bless him ! — was perfectly
genuine. He had just taken it to be inscribed,
ready for Joseph Leopold when he returned to
15 Friedenstrasse with me and his new teeth in. I
understood, or said I did.

They had taken it back ! . . .

Ach nein ! Ach nein !

191

192 The Flurried Years

And so on — arguing in terms of love, half angry, half
pacified, — I passed out of Germany into Belgium,
Picardy, France — lapped, cherished, as one may be once
perhaps in a lifetime — unawares rushing past the great
sad Cathedral shrouded also in the dark of the future.

Charing Cross again, past the high rostrum without
fear : then my home and my mother, a little old woman
with immense, unseeing eyes, that took in as much as
she wanted of the present — faint eyes turned inward on
the holy past of which so soon she would be called to
form part. Her thin, fine lips, that had never disclosed a
smile since the death of her husband-lover, marked no
sneer ; her old heart, like the last year's withered sheath
of a fruit, held not love. She merely diffused a weird,
futile benevolence on her faithful maid and on me, her
piteous, homing daughter.

And yet for me now a little space there was calm,
assuredness, no more furtive, chaperoned outgoings
and incomings, but a head held high and a bold front
for what must come. The sparrow among the horses'
hoofs that had so far avoided being trampled. I was
older. I had nothing, now, that I could hope to keep.
Who does keep ? What benefit but slips through one's
fingers, relaxing at the last like those of a spent swimmer,
palms outward ? Yet what bane, pre-indicated, is there
that cannot with proud intention be faced and borne ?

Deep in the gleaming glass
She sees all past things pass
And all sweet life that was
Lie down . . .

I never saw the Papers, or even the Johns again.
The war clapped a stopper on everything for everybody.
Mary, who was staying with the Johns when war broke
out, was hustled back, thrown out of Germany, made to
travel to Hamburg in a cattle-train with other useless
mouths, and crossed the Thames thinking that Mr.

The Flurried Years 193

Asquith was a prisoner in the Tower and that London
was a ruin. She never was more surprised in her life
than when she rolled smoothly into Charing Cross Station.

And also as a result of the war, I might say, like
Ophelia, " No, no, my lord, you never gave me aught."
He has never made me a present in his whole life except
a glove made in the form of a bear which, at my request,
he bought for me outside the Empire the night we went
to see Kyasht with Samuel Sidney McClure.

It was the Wind of the Flail.

Arriving from Trier at midnight (Gare de l'Est), we fell
in with the reservists, coming in late. We could hardly
get through. In the entry to that outlandish station
the wives and mothers stood on trucks and carts to pick
out their own from the troops disgorged from the last
train. I remembered the conversations that I used to
hear at Giessen and Trier — sly talk of the reserves —
would they be allowed to go home ? The terror of the
Socialist menace ... it had passed off, then ? Herr
Kiderlen-Waechter's diplomacy had been successful,
and so the little recruits were going home, crowding the
great stations of France and Germany in their thousands.
But in England they were still anxious. The manoeuvres
had been cancelled, because of the drought (?) on the very
day after rain began to fall ! The German ones for the
same excuse, and the French because of Foot and Mouth
Disease ! And the French Ambassador, worn out with
diplomacy, had gone quietly to bed — not Berlin.

We went to an hotel at Bellevue, so that the
patient could sleep in good air and take the boat up to
Paris every morning, past the Tour Eiffel and the little
wharves along the river side where Yvette used to go to
see her canotiers. Bellevue, which used to belong to the
Pompadour, with the ruins of her Brimborion, ivy-clad in
the garden, with the little baby woods of Meudon like a

Ny

194 The Flurried Years

shingled head, reached by a zig-zag track of cobblestones,
just as it was in the thirteenth century and the night-
ingales sang as then among the little young trees, which
have grown up since they were cut down in the stress of
1870. Les lauriers sont coupies. The terrace one
dined on, hearing dogs barking in Auteuil down below
where, in the dim blue studded with stars of light like
the Virgin's mantle in churches, Paris lay.

And we did as Napoleon, in his cynical wisdom,
prophesied Europe would do on hearing the news of his
demise : " Elle poussera un grand ' Oaf ! ' " It was so
nice to be done with the need for chaperonage : arranging
for it had been my task — Joseph Leopold was so incurably
Bohemian — and I had found it very irksome. It was
pleasant to have pretty things sent, pleasant things
written to one, and as soon as Joseph Leopold was
presentable, we meant to go home and gather up all
these joys and advantages and hold a literary salon.
That has always been my dream. And, for a space, it
was realised. I have not so much to complain of.

Invitations began to pour in . . . parties given in
my honour and his. ... I adored parties only a little
less than he did. But it was too soon. Joseph Leopold
still looked a — well, what, with astonishing lack of personal
vanity, he did not even begin to realise. So there was
nothing for it but to stop on at Bellevue where every
prospect indeed pleased but where the catering was vile.
Though Bellevue was very, very smart, though the band
played Tristan and Faust every night on the
terrace and all the French aristocracy and its children
played about there, we did not get enough to eat. I
spoke to the manager. He promised quelque chose de
plus copieux. Three minnows on a plate for the two of us 1
So the teeth followed the dentist to Quend-sur-Mer, a nice,
new, raw plage — an hotel with stone floors in one's bed-
room, with streets that were just shifting rivers of sand,

The Flurried Years 195

where one wore no stockings. We saw the beach from
our windows, and watched, when a certain hissing noise
was heard, all the mothers rushing like hens, clucking,
to gather their broods under their wings. For why ?
One of those new aeroplanes was flying low from Berck
to Fort Mahon ! At lunch and dinner, nuns sitting next
us told of the food riots at St. Quentin. The world was
really in a very disturbed state ! I was busy un-hareming
my skirt, putting a little petticoat under it, as, Agnes
informed me, was moderately the fashion now — to be
worn on a visit I was going to pay to Mrs. George Stringer,
Mary Martindale's good sport of an aunt, who liked me
for my general dash and daring, taking big jumps in
other fields than those in which her horse's hoofs were
cast. And she would have it that I was a kind of relation
— on the wrong side of the blanket. An Armada Don,
who, to use Lady Colin Campbell's famous explanation
of her own parentage and Spanish eyes, had "tampered"
with our pedigree. I certainly was the image of a
sister of hers who died, a Harrison, and I am a Harrison,
too — the Barnard Castle ones.

It was George Stringer himself who wrote and sent me
a formal invitation to Hovingham Spa, a tiny, roughish
but comfortable inn in the North Riding, where this
devotee of the chase had boxed herself and her husband
and her favourite new hunter, prepared to go out three
days a week. I knew how it would be ! All day she
would be after the hounds, and her husband and I would
wait dinner, expecting to see her brought back on a
shutter. But, when it did happen, I was not there to
see. Poor Edith Stringer !

It was time, too, that I went to have a look at my
mother, the saddest of all experiences to me now. It
was just a little attention I paid her. I would just walk
into her room, kiss her and say, " Well, Mamma, how
are you ? " She would not answer now, kiss back, or

196 The Flurried Years

even smile. She preferred her nice nurse to any of her
daughters. She confounded me with Goneril !

A week in England would do it — did both.

Then I returned, and accompanied Joseph Leopold
back into Germany by way of Luxemburg. We arrived
there at one o'clock. When I saw Luxemburg, composed
of rows of villas with machicolated palings, exactly like
Holland Park Road, Joseph Leopold tells everybody I
gave one wild scream, and said, " Let's get into Germany,"
where the vintage was just beginning.

It had been the hottest summer since 1453. The
outrageous heat which was Europe's poison was the South
German's meat, and the vintage was going to be a record
one. This was the true pax Germanica — no noise, no
quarrelling, an almost Sabbatical hush. Germany was
going to get in its harvest. The crop is set anywhere
and everywhere, perched on every possible coign, on a
mountain — anywhere where it may catch the sun. The
vines cover the hills like green fur on the haunches of a
big dog. The vine plant, taken singly, is to me a
pathetic object, like a doll, dressed like an early Victorian
lady, in a gown flounced to the waist, of soft taffetas in
faintly differing shades. They reminded me of the late
Lady Wilde, who had dressed just like this.

And everyone was friendly, and I was reassured. It
was an effect of the vintage. It was not a Gin — but a
Vine crawl. We were all of us all day picking grapes,
tasting grapes, choosing and buying them in the great
tubs in which they came down in carts from the vine
terraces. Everybody was doing it. The landlord of
our hotel was a great W einhandler , and put us up to
bargains, as he would for himself. At the close of the
day we came back in the little ambling trains with pickers,
pressers, and W einhandler s ; lovers wreathing each other
with vine tendrils, mothers of families sticking them in
their hats, while little green, translucent marbles fell out

The Flurried Years 197

of parcels and rolled all over the floors of the carriages.
It was a madness, and, like all madnesses, at the bottom
of the madness is blood and a human sacrifice. The
juices of a human body are sov'ran for the vine root that
is to grow into the tree that spreads all over the roof.
The best manure is human, but most of the householders
have to be content with a pair of old boots or a
portmanteau.

Pickers, Pressers, and Weinhandlers, I liked them all ;
I liked everybody in Germany this time, except the
officers, and I hated them so and their beastly attitude
— to all men, their own countrymen even — that I
could hardly be as civil as Joseph Leopold would have
me be. He was now, if you please, a German and a
potential officer himself. If war broke out and he were
caught on German soil, he must either fight or be shot.
Not much, against England !

I resented having to wait in the street at Hildesheim
in the sun to have my lunch till the officers had had theirs,
standing under the sill of the Speise Saal, peeping under
the blind where I could only see their legs and the points
of their swords touching the floor as they ate little crabs
stewed in wine. I disliked the way every little Einjahriger
in his skimpy grey suit stood up and let his food run out
of his mouth as he saluted, while his superior on his way
to the stammtisch labelled " Reservirt," and in his brilliant
and flamboyant cloak, brushed the salt-cellar off my
table in passing. I hated to have the deep peace of the
woods broken for me a hundred times in the course of
half an hour's walk by " Rub-a-dub, rub-a-dub " from
one of the many concealed casernes. I hated to look
down from the top of the 'bus and see the naked soldiers
washing their clothes or themselves, calmly, out of doors
in barrack yards.

And, when you did talk to anyone in the lounge of the
hotel, if there was one, it was all about the Socialist menace

198 The Flurried Years

and the return or no of the reserves that heralds the
coming of the autumn as Mai-Bowie does that of the
spring. Socialism was the reason why there wasn't an
ounce of gold in Trier — but there never is in the autumn.
Something to do with it . . . some precaution ?

Three years of constant agitation had done their work,
and I went back to Spa to be doctored. Spa was not
the same. Faces were mome. Even then the spectre
of war stalked — though humbly for the moment. It had
been put back in the cupboard for the time by the address
of Herr Kiderlen-Waechter, afraid, as yet, of " Der
Tag." But there was a restlessness, a hush among the
population, scurrying like autumn leaves . . . darts for
safety . . . hedgings . . . while bold spirits in Spa said
simply, " Oh, we know, we Belgians, that we — our land
— are going to be fought over ! " One never could drive
very far towards the east without coming across the
Squashed Crow of Prussia. One day we decided to go
to Montjoie across the frontier, past Malmedy, and to
buy cigars and marquetry furniture with the Guilleaumes.
The car was at the door to take us when a card was sent
in. A reporter from England : The Daily Something.

I whispered to Joseph Leopold, " Don't let him in."
I didn't want publicity, I deprecated it, although we
both of us had new books out. It is simply an odious
literary " wheeze " unworthy of either of us. I retreated
to the inner room to put on my boots for Montjoie, and
while I was stooping I distinctly heard Joseph Leopold
offering someone a drink. I looked through the door
and saw a mild young man looking very travel-stained,
explaining that he had been travelling all night and that
his chief had sent a letter announcing his arrival, which
Joseph Leopold was declaring he had never received.
More conversation, of an exceedingly general character,
so far as I could make out.

The Flurried Years 199

He was dismissed politely, and we started for Montjoie-
But I understood that the young gentleman " rested "
all day in Spa, and pottered about, visiting
Houtermans, where Joseph Leopold went most nights
to play billiards with the son of the house and that
interesting rip, Count M., whose relations kept him at
Spa for cheapness. And on Monday, as we saw by the
papers, the harm was done !

A Frontier ! Herbestal is a frontier, and a station too.
The frontier is a line like the equator of our childhood,
without breadth or thickness, drawn across the road we
were to cross. One pictures vedettes — sentinels with
kepis, anyway, soldiers — decent fellows who mean no
harm, but have been taught for years in a sunlit square
to go for a bag of sawdust stitched into the semblance
of a man with a bayonet — chatting with the other fellow,
exchanging drinks, putting one leg, but not more, over
the imaginary line of demarcation. I became, though
ill, excited. Bowling along a heath, down declivities
and a blue sheen on the horizon that was Germany, I
began to shed my wraps, stand up, and ask questions.

" What are those ? " of hills that looked like north-
country slag-heaps, obviously made by man, with wheel-
barrows trundled to the edge and allowed to roll down.
But the wheelbarrows were derelict ; no man was there
to wheel them.

" German railway lines," said Emile Guilleaume.

" But why are they left like that — unfinished ? "
' They may not carry them — yet — any farther than
the frontier. But they are so as to be ready."

From that moment war — war between somebody or
other — became an actuality to me. Not Germany
attacking, not that moment ! Just then the boot was on
the other leg. France was ready. France was belligerent.
Inflammatory posters to that effect were up everywhere.

200 The Flurried Years

We were descending, slowly, the hill.

" Germany down there," Joseph Leopold said. " You'll
see the Squashed Crow in a minute."

A little cottage, and no garden, squarely set down
in the dip. The eagle of Prussia on the signboard,
nothing else. It was the Douane. The chauffeur shook
his head. Nothing to declare ! The taciturn officer
sitting inside a kind of grille looked us over and made us
free of Germany. We saw nothing, but we heard " Rub-
a-dub, rub-a-dub," and, as the chauffeur told us, passed
two separate army corps being reviewed, and then we
came to Montjoie, a little town like a chromolithograph
on the outside of a chocolate box. Small fir trees, lining
both sides of the street with green, brushed the wheels
of our car. They were staged, not planted, for the Kaiser
had just visited Montjoie, and the yellow paper roses fes-
tooning the pink house of Commerciens Rath 0. had not yet
faded after their manner, for there had been no rain since.

An operation, and home, in time for Mrs. Aria's " ten
o'clock." Passage bad. Only Joseph Leopold and I
and a French lady keeping our ends up, staring at the
water pouring through the scuppers ; the rest were lying
like badly packed herrings, heads to tails, like victims
laid out for the car of Juggernaut to pass over them.
No room to live, no room tb die, no room to be sick in.
Five minutes before we were due into Dover Joseph
Leopold stumbled to the steward's cabin, where he keeps
his champagne. . . .

" You can't be sick here, sir ! "

" I can ! " gravely, and was.

The anecdote was in Punch next week.

We landed on the wrong pier — the trimmings of the
other were all swept away — walked in a blizzard to the
London train, and I was in a new dress and at Mrs. Aria's
by eleven o'clock.

The Flurried Years 201

My mother was quasi all right, a partially mummified
corpse, in better health, happier, and content within her
borders and her floor to herself. I was not wanted, and
Lady Byron lent me her house at Sandgate, nice and
near Joseph Leopold's great friends, Conrad and Marwood.

Goneril and Co. were still chipping me, but, like the
toad under the harrow, being " lamed " to be a toad, I
was getting used to it. And Professor Ker, who had
been up to see Goneril, went for a walk with her, and
reported that she still spoke of me with affection. " I
believe you could get on with her if you came. She is
fond of you. I told her that I owed a great deal to you
— indeed, it is one of the purely happy things in my life
that you should have honoured me with your confidence."

But, in spite of this, the pretty little policy of pin-
pricks that ends by bleeding one to death went on.
Criticisms of my method of procuring the comfort of
my mother, domestic details, set forth on foolscap sheets
with acres of margin. . . . ! I threatened to resign my job,
which would have put everybody in a hole, so I was let
alone for a time.

Then Joseph Leopold took it into his head to get
distracted. One night, I remember, there had been
various doings in town . . . my maid had been up to
town charged to carry a letter re the children — you may
be sure there was a cheque in it ! — to their uncle, and
had come back again in time for dinner with the story
of an Implacable Face . . . seen at the station. . . .
She had felt awful all the way in the train coming back
. . . seeing Those Eyes ! She had walked back all the way,
her heart in her big boots, expecting to find me scragged!

She engagingly told us all this, with details added
and worked up, as she waited at dinner, and when I was
lying in bed that night, rather early, Joseph Leopold came
up with a white, scared face and asked me if I had heard
the front door bell ring a few moments ago. I hadn't.

202 The Flurried Years

But, he said, it had pealed all through the house. . . .

No more was said that night ; but, moved by a sense of
imminence, I woke at five, got up, and went over the
house. The place was all tied up with odd straps,
strings, and dog-leads ; a bicycle, out of its place,
obstructed the door ; my maid was locked into her
room, also Lady Byron's cook. Only the dog, a fierce bull
terrier I had bought, roamed unshackled about the stairs.
And all this for fear that the Eyes had meant mischief.

It was the beginning of a fresh attack of neurasthenia
that lasted three whole years, and was responsible for
many things, and much private and particular misery.
Marwood, called in, said I must get Joseph Leopold out
of it. . . . Of all people he best appreciated the situation,
and seemed to think my position disastrous. He saw
no way out of it unless it was to go where writs didn't
run. Paris ! Why didn't Joseph Leopold apply for
a foreign correspondentship ? But — " Ah, you can't go,
poor thing ; you are tied to your mother." And then,
sitting with me in the long rock garden stretching right
down to the sea, he suggested a plan . . . slimmish. . . .

I demurred. Everybody, he said, would not have been
so scrupulous. " Remember that people don't impute
higher motives to others than they have themselves."

As for Joseph Leopold, the best cure for him was
congenial society. Rene Byles, now manager of the
Throne, was got down to stay, and I arranged that
Joseph Leopold should see as much of Conrad as might
be. The way to Conrad's heart just then was a motor-
car, so we used to get one from Clayson's and go out
to Orlestone to bring the Conrads and the little boy,
Jackolo, back to lunch. In the dining-room here, from
whose windows, as one sat at meat, one could see all
the sea between Grisnez and Dungeness : the old sea dog,
excitable, eager, was distracted from his lunch — wel-
coming, describing the nature of the craft, large and

The Flurried Years 203

small, that sailed or steamed past. He called Joseph
Leopold and me " dear " — it was perhaps a sign of
affection as far as Joseph Leopold was concerned, but
I think it was just a foreign locution, a neat and kind
finial to a sentence. He reminded me a little of another
quasi-foreigner, William Quiller Orchardson, the Scot
with an Austrian grandmother (whom he never let you
forget) to whom I used to sit for the Empress Josephine
at Westgate. Conrad was adorable. Or we would go
to tea or dinner with them in that queer, squat, flat-
roofed house, set down in a marshy meadow just off a
white, winding road bordered by deep ditches, in which
marshmallows grew and low fences over which cattle
yearned their heads. Flat, flat — the heart of the country
which Joseph Leopold once described, a soft, even level,
such as all lives should be — are sometimes — a desert,
perhaps, but — fit to be called peace.

While Joseph Conrad and Joseph Leopold were inside
discussing serious things — le mot juste, or a further
collaboration ; Reality to succeed Romance — Mrs. Conrad
would walk me along the road. She knew all the people
who indirectly swayed my fortunes, and she meant to
be kind. In her little foreign way, perhaps learned
from her husband (she is, of course, quite English),
she hinted at some shadowy horror, some " catastrophe "
or other which was preparing for me. Can a catastrophe
— which is usually the Will of God — be prepared for a
particular person ? I then thought kind Mrs. Conrad
wool-gathering . . . fallacious . . . trying her hand at
her husband's metier. I little knew.

A minor catastrophe — engineered by nobody — occurred
inside at tea. I " cheeked " Mr. Conrad — I see it now ;
but I had played with lions so often in my life that I
didn't anticipate a pat from the paw of one. Sitting
at the long, low table that stretched from the window
into the dark infinity of the sideboard at the other end

204 The Flurried Years

of the room, next Conrad, the tea-maker — or was tea
over, and had Mrs. Conrad relinquished her seat? — I
embarked on a political discussion with the great man.
Joseph Leopold was having another political discussion
far away at the sideboard end, and I, unprotected, found
myself up against, suddenly, a soi-disant believer in
the Divine Right of Kings.

I have two subjects on which I am well read and well
advised, and one is the French Revolution. The course
of my reading had not inculcated a very high view of the
political honesty of Marie Antoinette, but I certainly
did not approach her problem in " a frivolous, fine-lady
fashion " (vide Joseph Leopold in his Life of Conrad),
but I do consider The Austrian's husband, in spite of
his wits crowded out by adipose, to be the finer, more
responsible character. Yes, I thought that the un-
fortunate Louis XVI had come to be unter den Pantoffel
of a, politically speaking, dishonourable woman, who
ended by having his head off and her own for the
political crime of inviting the foreign invader to come
into the country that had become hers by marriage, and
which had adopted her for weal or woe. That France
made her life a burden to her, and would not let her
leave it, seems to me to have nothing to do with the
matter. I dared to say this to Conrad, whose every
word I was drinking in and whose compelling personality
sheerly and starkly fascinated me. I have never seen a
man who had this power of re-making everyone who had
the honour of listening to him into his own image. . . .

Well, I suppose that I was not sufficiently susceptible
for the moment to the ether, the laughing gas of his
personality — not quite " gone off," and stupidly disre-
garded the intense, wolf-like expression which came
over his face and ought to have warned me that I was
on dangerous ground. The sparrow hopping among
the hoofs ! I said that I considered Marie Antoinette,

The Flurried Years 205

as titular Queen of France, to be technically a traitress !

There was a noise and clatter. Conrad brought his
fist down on the tin tea-tray, and the cups danced
horribly, but not one was broken, as Joseph Leopold has
stated. And, indeed, he could not have heard from his
place at the very end of the table, his ears submissive
to the drone of a bore. . . .

Conrad had said, his eyes darting fire — a blue shade
seeming to play about his chin :

" I believe in the Divine Right of Kings."

And no more about it. Mrs. Conrad had not turned
a hair. She never did. The perfect wife for an author !

We took them little drives in the car, and as many
of them as we could, especially when there were, perhaps,
for the moment " only a few goats." For the explanation
of this intimate catchword look at the last few words of
Romance — " Excellency, a few goats ! " That was
Joseph Leopold's and Joseph Conrad's mode of intimating
that money, or credit, or health, was tight ! It is another
way of saying, as I do in like conditions, " Alles ist hin "
("All is lost").

Joseph Leopold had taken off his boots in the Conrads'
anteroom and forgotten to put them on again, driving
home with composure in his stockinged feet. They came
next day, with a kind note from the very great man to me.
Not a word of Marie Antoinette. But maybe the incident
had discomposed Joseph Leopold. The note dilated,
perhaps in irony ? — for under certain pedicular conditions
men and women, too, like sitting in their stockinged feet —
on Joseph Leopold's exquisite regard for the polished
floors of the Palazzo Conrad. It had brought tears to
the host's eyes when he " looked round on the rough and
unfeeling world which encompasseth us all." A little
dig at the eternal rival :

" You should see the good Marwood's Alpine boots! "

1912-13

Aunt Jane and Canon Greenwell — The " Throne " — My Mother does not know
me — Adalin — Rebecca West — Cubism and Wyndham Lewis — Selsey
and Princess Maleine — The Poison Ring — A Workaday Heaven for
me — Goneril — My Mother's Death — Mary's suspicions — Treason at
Giessen — Joseph Leopold to Germany — To finish his job — Horrors
of the Cause List — Boulogne — A Bed of Nails not Roses — Trial over
the Telephone — Meet Joseph Leopold on the other side — Conrad recom-
mends Montpellier — His Sense of Colour — I see Carcassonne — Mad
Dogs and Horoscopes — The Chateau d' Amour — Conrad and James —
" Patch with purple if you must " — Corsica.

The Governess, a novel begun long ago by my mother
and finished by me, had appeared in March. Years
ago she had given the manuscript to me, saying I must
please finish it, as she never could, publish it as a serial,
and make what money I could out of it. I agreed.
Joseph Leopold helped me. It came out.

"Just the kind of book your dear mother would write,"
my Aunt Jane wrote from the North, which showed how
cleverly I and Joseph Leopold had caught my mother's
style and " joined " her flats. " A nice, quiet book,"
my Aunt Jane continued, and was going to lend it to
the vicar.

She possibly remembered her elder sister's first novel,
which would not at all answer to that description, con-
taining, as it did, striking and viperous portraits of the
Dean, not to speak of the Bishop and the Bishop's wife.
It created a nine days' scandal in Durham, and was
let out by the lending library at half a crown an hour —
" and mind you return it in time ! "

Aunt Jane was now fairly placated. Things had turnec

out rather better than she had expected. She had beer

to see my godfather, the Canon, who called her " Janey "

206

The Flurried Years 207

in memory of old times, and appeared to be quite proud
of his godchild. He thought Joseph Leopold charming —
we had been to see him — and so did the Dean and the
Archdeacon. But he could not read his books. He
liked " shockers " in the Mail. And I, from what she
heard, was in quite a nice set in London — good county
people, and titles, who lent me their houses. She would
continue heartily to pray for me, if not on the old count,
abolished, then on one count or another. And she would
intercede for me with Goneril, who did not consider the
book good or worth raking up, and thought I ought to
have let it rest and not make money out of my poor
mother's infirmities. Goneril a literary critic ! That
was rich !

This " nice, quiet book " it may have been which led
up to Mrs. Conrad's " catastrophe." The poor Throne
reviewed it kindly and favourably, with portraits of my
mother and myself and descriptive remarks below. I
was quite pleased when I saw the review, little thinking
that the " nice, quiet book " was to be the ground of
fracas. It was sought to gain an injunction on the
ground that its publication was unauthorised . . . the
book had not been given to me ... it was not good.
My mother, had she been sensible, would have deplored
its publication. Et patati et patata !

This set a little match — one of the little matches that
were constantly being set to my funeral pyre ; some
flared up and some went out, but this one made quite a
blaze. In April my resignation from the Receivership,
which in January I had threatened if Goneril went on
interfering with me, was again tendered and accepted in
the form of a demand from her. In May formal pro-
ceedings were instituted ; the case came on. Again and
again I had to dress soberly — I don't know why my in-
stinct was so to do — and, getting out of a 'bus just before
it got to Temple Bar, where my Jacobite ancestor's head

208 The Flurried Years

had rotted because he opened the gates of Carlisle to the
men of his opinion, proceed to the side door in Bell Yard
and up the stone staircase to face again the pathetic
figure of The Master — my mother's old friend, stricken
as she was, striving as she did against fearful odds — to do
his work of administering equal justice to her daughters
and see that they treated her properly. Just a little
family quarrel — everybody a little in the wrong, for
nobody is ever quite in the right in a family quarrel,
since family passions are apt to run so high.

Blindness is my particular fear and horror, the
Eumenides of our family—" Papa's eyes," " Mamma's
eyes " — phrases on every one's lips ! The constant
condition of those of my mother was the reason why I
had read everything since the day she found I could
spell and pronounce " ecclesiastical." Two hours a
day in the dining-room, sometimes interested, sometimes
not. The Master's clerk delivering slowly the words of
important documents, called up my old sense of pity
for one so dependent on a mere child and " not able
to have anything improper read," as she used to say,
laughing. So I sympathised with The Master, though
I writhed under his sarcasms.

A disconsolate author was at my side to support me.
Sulky, top-hatted, loathing it — and almost me !

Rene Byles was still friendly to me, and urgent in my
service — a stormy petrel, the thorn in his editor's side,
the potential wrecker of his darling paper. As early as
June there was an action threatened against it — on my
account — and again in July. But not till next year did
the threat materialise.

I did not dread it. I didn't for a moment think that
the Chief and Byles wouldn't come out on top, but it
would, of course, worry them and Joseph Leopold a good
deal. All through the year I watched the case creeping
up the List in the Telegraph . . . nearer . . . nearer !

#*•

#

MY SISTER

r.fr.

[/> 208

The Flurried Years 209

The gadfly began to buzz in the June of 1912. It
advanced its proboscis and stung in the February of
next year.

The saddest thing about the law is the law's delays.
There were delays ; there always are ; all actions seem
to require time, and six months seems about the least
possible time required for their incubation, just as, in a
telegram, you cannot be polite under one shilling and three
pence. So say I, speaking as a ruthful laywoman,
for, writing as a suffragette, I must tacitly include my
own sex among those privileged to wear robe and gown.
I don't really know why I have not constantly confided
my legal affairs to one of these ; it is very inconsistent
of me !

Perhaps one cause of delay is that the law, like trades
unions preaching down the worker's heart, will not let
its workers lay too many bricks in a day. First the
challenge . . . then months of sparring and back-chat
. . . then the fight, or part of it . . . the backers waiting
with their towels ready to flap . . . refreshers . . .
and then the knock-out blow, the perfunctory handshake,
the thin, shoddy consolations of compromise. . . .

The Throne affair wasn't the only thing. There was
bankruptcy — another spectre, so it seems to be to most
people. I don't think Joseph Leopold minded the idea
much. It was minded for him. For myself, I never
can see why it appears such a spectre — to one's kind
family lawyer, anyway. After all, why should a hard-
working man, earning just so much money — part of
which is hypothecated to others — by the sweat of his
brow and the waste of his mental tissue, object to the
law's managing, in return for a small consideration, his
earnings for him, apportioning them where they are due,
leaving him enough to live on and to pay for a desk
whereon to write, and a secretary to take down what he
does write ? Women don't mind bankruptcy as much

Oy

210 The Flurried Years

as men do. Perhaps that is why they are so seldom
threatened with it. I suppose a man hates the feeling
of being compelled always to spend ready money, not
allowed to run up bills. A bankrupt can hardly use the
grand manner, being at the best a minor under tutelage.
It is the Victorian prejudice against a man's not being
master in his own house and everywhere else as well,
that still obtains.

And that's not all ! My own special law business in
which Joseph Leopold had nothing to say — nor wanted
to — the nightmare charge of my mother. This is the very
natural function of a daughter, as I have said, an act of
filial piety required of me, accepted of me ; but, since
the assuming of it, I had been heckled, thwarted, misinter-
preted, handicapped on all sides, so that I felt it almost
a burden too heavy. And yet, for her sake, I thought
I must not lay it down. She must die in her own house,
not in ... .

And the worst, I knew, was to come, when the beloved
burden should slip off.

Heavy ! She ! The little still, silent, shrunken witch
of a parent, as light as a feather . . . mentally as
imponderable, that I had taken on my back to bear
through the bogs and the thorns, under the thudding
hail of abuse and blistering raindrops of opprobrium,
was coming to be regarded by me in the light of the
fairy whom the kind man in the tale offered to shoulder —
the little load of mischief that grew to him heavier and
heavier, till he became aware that he was bearing the
weight of a supernatural being which would weigh him
down and crush him in the end.

One version says it was his own sins. . . .

It was too much. I became a nuisance about the
house — a woman of one idea, and that an unpleasant
one antithentic to socibility, to the lure of sex, and to

The Flurried Years 211

the production of good literature. Talk of poverty and
the consequent flight of Love out of the window — it
does not clear the room of all amatory stuff like a woman
with a lawsuit on ! I thought of nothing else ; I dreamed
of nothing else. I used my power of imagination, of
" a fire God gave for other ends," in order to work up
the horrors of my own twopenny-halfpenny case. I
had nightmares, when I seemed to be dragged backwards
and forwards by an angry Goneril, sometimes by my
hair even, up and down the stone floors of the Law
Courts.

All this damned me thoroughly with Joseph Leopold
who complained bitterly of my natal restlessness,
increased by the extra cargo foisted on me by Fate. My
behaviour was absolutely antagonistic to him and his
particular Wesen. Why could I not be quiet, possess
my soul in patience, take a sleeping-draught at night,
and Adalin, that nice new German drug, by day, as he
did ? I knew he did (four a night, into which I was
gradually drafting bread pills). Tebby-Tebb had pre-
scribed that and real Adalin for me ! I needed it.

I seem to remember going about this queer, dry, hot
summer of 191 2 to garden-parties where you were never
cool, to suppers. under trees where bustling night insects
dashed against the lamps and moths flapped and died.
I gave suppers, too. I must keep Joseph Leopold amused
since my sorrows made me unavailable. I was useless,
living in a dream, full of the kind drug which we were
both taking. It did not hurt one . . . only made one
something of a philosopher. I remember kind Mrs.
Stringer wondering what was the matter with me,
offering to take me away to Yorkshire for the hunting.
Hunting ! Far too healthy a sport for me ! I interested
myself in watching Maleine drifting about our house
in her own modest but queenly, superior way, soothed,
positively, by her beauty and the gentle cynicism of the

212 The Flurried Years

few words she said. In and out, all days and every day.

Did she? Did he? Wouldn't she? It and I
didn't matter. . . .

I must have been a bore. It was no use talking to me
for I never listened. I was " only thinking about my
sisters." My terror of what might happen to me — locks
and keys — warders and prison cells — looked out of my
eyes continually.

Joseph Leopold wanted to abate the nuisance. He
enjoined short views ! If they did eventually succeed
in downing me, why, we could simply chuck the whole
thing and go back to Germany, as a standby, its savage
dreariness tempered with little trips to San Sebastian
or Montjoie or even to Le Touquet where the great
Vardon was playing golf. . . .

For really if I went on like this, thinking of nothing
else but law and lawsuits, boring my friends with ques-
tions unanswerable till after the event, asking for tips,
suggestions as to what I ought to do or ought not to do —
a far bigger list — I should have no one but myself to
thank for what might happen. No man could stand
living side by side with a woman whose sympathies were
all afield, the sodden prey of an idee fixe — not of him —
and consequently no earthly good to anyone. Why did
I worry so about money, a woman of my intellect ?

Well, I replied pettishly, because someone had to !
And I stood to lose every penny I had in the world if I
lost my case. And le mot juste would be hard put to it
to keep me. This extremely difficult contingency it
was which gave me my nightmares.

Joseph Leopold seemed, to the naked eye, to take it
all pretty calmly — his own troubles and mine. He
sat there in the Futurist room, neatly and with aplomb
dictating his daily screed of typewritten pages. He
preserved at least his literary balance, the pendulum
of his thought ticking backwards and forwards with an

The Flurried Years 213

even motion. Great man ! He could concentrate. His
inner commotion was subdued by the superior claims
of Literature on its votary. Perfect copy flowed from
his mouth as he walked up and down the room. No
corrections were made or apparently needed ; he scorned
to look over a manuscript after his secretary had
typed it. And why — since the line was cleared as for
an express train ? No alarums or excursions of the
brain were allowed to interfere with its mass product.
As for the quality — the avoirdupois — that must be left
with the critics, whom he little regarded, except perhaps
Edward Garnett.

And then Marwood got cross with us. Joseph Leopold
and I had made a book which perpetrated one of those
literary dastardies unavoidable in his profession and
mine — so I firmly submit.

It is a fact not generally realised, except with painters,
that all artists must have models, especially the modern
ones. That distinguished Academician, Fuseli, ate a
raw beefsteak and went to bed and dreamed, not true,
but such ineffable scenes of horror that he needed not
to use actual models, but relied on the inventions of
his sleeping, beef-iodised brain. Mary Shelley wrote
" Frankenstein," and who now reads about that affected,
unconvincing monster ? The present school of painters
who go to bed soberly and use living models at four
shillings an hour do the head from one — expensive —
and the hands from another — less expensive — and the
bust, say, from their own wife — perfectly cheap. The
conglomeration or concatenation can hardly be called a
portrait. So when a literature-picture of a total person-
ality is put together it is non-libellous in effect, being a
mere blend — an action of A's, a speech of D's, a look of
C, the hair or eyes of F. Surely such a preparation or
composite of aliens cannot possibly be dubbed a descrip-
tion of Z.

214 The Flurried Years

It is a pity, but the public must realise that authors,
like beggars, cannot be choosers.

At least this particular work gave us Rebecca West,
whose literary flair and connaissance du style could not
be deceived or side-tracked, and who, devoting to our
effort a whole column of wit and innuendo — as destructive,
about, as a prairie fire — laid us waste and made us her
friends for life. She butchered us to make a holiday
for a number of The — won't it be kinder and wiser to
blank the name of the publication ? She little knew.
" Oh, Diamond ! Diamond ! "

There was nothing else, I said, to do but ask this
dangerous woman to tea. It would be turning the other
cheek — two cheeks.

She came. She had a pink dress on and a large,
wide-brimmed, country-girlish straw hat that hid her
splendid liquid eyes, which, however, no brim of any
hat could hinder one from apprehending. She kept
her feet planted very regularly and firmly together,
and throughout the interview retained her handsome
handbag (which was rather like a satchel) on her lap,
where she had placed it when I said timidly, " Won't
you sit down, Miss West ? "

She was sweet and reasonable, but not to be kidded.
We told her stories about the work in question, and she
appeared to believe us. She was very good at listening,
and when she spoke she used a voice — not of gold exactly,
like the fabled one of Sarah Bernhardt, but, let us say,
one compounded of milk and honey, something
mellifluous, soothing, like sweet bells rung in tune.
And quite superiorly, ostentatiously, young — the ineffable
schoolgirl ! She was, in fact, only eighteen, and she
already ruled Fleet Street. She is to-day, as Conrad
was, a compelling, holding, powerful personality. She
must count ; once she is in a room you cannot imagine
it without her, except as a room in Ditchwater. If she

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The Flurried Years 215

wants to hurt you she will ; if she wants to be kind to
you, well and very good ! There is no paltering with
the idea of Rebecca ; she makes, not so much a splash,
as a definite hole in the world.

A languid airless summer, rife with Law and Cubism,
spent at Selsey with Princess Maleine as sole guest and
play-secretary. Her husband flitted backwards and
forwards in his car, now recalling her, now giving her
a new leave of absence. Joseph Leopold, playing golf,
eating little contraband crabs, writing poems, and helping
me with my novel, and taking a car into Chichester on
Sundays to attend Mass in his own church, contrived to
wile the summer away. He wrote Impressionist ; she
painted Futurist; in dress, we two women went a step
farther and dressed Vorticist, which was newer than
Futurism, than Cubism, than Impressionism, old-
fashioned almost by now, but which Joseph Leopold
was still practising in his cunning vers libres.

The very clothes we rejoiced to wear made us feel like
it ; they coarsened us, I think. Non-representational
art makes for hardness, enjoins the cynicism that likes
to look upon the crudenesses, the necessaries of life
merely — the red of beef, the blue of blouses, the shine
of steel knives in a butcher's shop. Better, said Wynd-
ham Lewis, than a dying stag or a virgin in Greek dress
picking daisies. But this kind of art died in the war,
being relegated chiefly to the camouflaging of ships. A
faint echo of it is to be seen in modern jazz.

My friend was very beautiful, with a queer, large,
tortured mouth that said the wittiest things, eyes that
tore your soul out of your body for pity and yet danced.
She had no physique, as doctors would say ; no health,
as women would say ; and — as no woman would ever
admit except me — charm enough to damn a regiment.
I used to call her the Leaning Tower, or Princess Maleine,

2i6 The Flurried Years

that heroine of Maeterlinck who, with her maid, was
prisoned in a tower for ten years and dug herself out
with her nails. She ought not to have dressed in butcher
blue with red blood spots on it. She was much more
like one of those delicate, anaemic, mediaeval ladies whose
portraits are traced on old tapestries, their small waists
seeming to be set between the enormous wings of the
hennin and the heavy rolls of their trains that spread
all round their feet. The modern blouse and skirt of
Maleine, born out of her century, always appeared to
be falling off her, her crown of heavy hair toppling, her
deep brown eyes protesting against Fate and the absurd
limitations of behaviour applied to supermen and under-
women. She was no real suffragette, though she had
collected with me and rattled a box at stations. Nothing
but her eyes protested. Delicately cynical, she accepted
things as they were.

She was gentle and patient, even in her desperate illness.
In health she was easily the easiest woman to live with I
have ever known, and she stayed with me long at Selsey.
Intermittently, when she was well enough, like all the
other pretty ladies she played secretary to Joseph
Leopold, and, in the evenings he read aloud to us from
the script that she knew well, having taken it down at
dictation that very morning. That is the way we did
in the heartless days of the Cube and the Line. He
would " pay out " in a rope of measured, even tarnish
cadences, that yet held emotion, the poem that I had
asked him to write for me.

I had said pettishly :

" You say you believe in a heaven ; I wish you'd
write one for me. I want no beauty ; I want no damned
optimism ; I want just a plain, workaday heaven that
I can go to some day and enjoy it when I'm there."

I confess I had thought of the ultimate cataclysm as,
alone in the mornings while the dictation was going on,

The Flurried Years 217

I wandered round one or other of the three beaches of
Selsey, conscious of the drone of a sad sea line on the
two other sides, pacing on the edge, without looking
where I was going, of the octagonal tanks that represented
the efforts of the inhabitants of the peninsula to keep
the sea in here, let it out there. . . . The Selsey sea is
not a Swinburne sea — no sea lions racing in, no foam,
no spume; just " the British Channel . . . like a strip of
flannel " under the moon at night. ... I would come
in late sometimes for lunch, and I would meet the poet
rushing, hatless, down the village street, wanting to
know if I had committed suicide.

Not yet ; although I had my poison ring, like the
head of an enamelled, jewelled toad, with the bolt that
shot and the lid that lifted, disclosing a cavity just big
enough to hold a mere pinch of nitrate of amyl — that
was the poison that Mr. Harcourt, at the Oxford labora-
tory, had suggested for the use of the heroine of my
novel, Unkist, Unkind, years ago. All I had done with
my ring as yet was to put a Saxine tablet into the cache
in order to unnerve the man who took me in to dinner.

I was a little like my own heroine, Sibella, but I realised
in my saner moments that authors need Egerias, and that
I, blasted by the family feud, was no sort of Egeria just
then. He told me so.

When my Workaday Heaven was quite arranged for
me the poet read it to us in the little dark drawing-room
of the cottage by the sea — to me and to Maleine — con
amore, sans facon, tactlessly evincing his honest joy
in his own work. He read it many times . . . the effect,
intensely personal, vaguely metaphysical, was hypnotic.
One came to regard the soft, effortless reading of it as if
it were the solemn unwrapping of a cocoon, the close,
gluey sheath being slowly unwound from a new-born
soul in religion ! The personalities of us three, all in
sympathy, good Lord ! — perfect or imperfect — were

218 The Flurried Years

merged. We criticised the poem, actually. We were
all artists for the nonce, a man and two women in the
strange, occasional solidarity that the mutual pursuit
of art for the sake of art can give and maintain.

My poem, mine ! " To V. H. who asked me for a
Working Heaven " — so runs the foreword. " A Frivolous
Heaven " would have been a better name, or " A Baby
Heaven," or " A Doll's Heaven " — written to please
me ; to explain and to reveal, as the maker saw it, the
truth. I had asked for it. I am brave. I sucked it in
and the knowledge it conveyed to me like a potion.
For this poem, when at last I got it rounded and com-
plete, set the seal of verity on my surmises as to the nature
of one at least of the varieties of amatory experience.
I know now that there must be several varieties of this
emotion, apart from Love itself, the Emperor moth, the
Koh-i-noor — as singular and rare a manifestation as the
aloe's blossoming or the building of the Taj Mahal.

" God is a good man . . . God is a kind man. ..."
A jolly, licensed publican of a fellow ! My Poem turned
out as profane a piece of work as Grimm's Kinder
Mdrchen or the Bible itself at times. The introduction
of earthly love into heaven could not but be profane
according to the usual canons. . . .

And now for the varieties. The loves of the angels,
and this was not quite it ! The loves of the triangles, and
this was certainly not it — not a straight line anywhere !
The loves of the artists, and this, more likely, was it.

Of this variety there are sectional divisions — vegetable
Love, which fdls the florists and other nurseries, adjusted,
as Tennyson says, "with anthers and with dust";
rococo Love ; Queen Anne teacup Love ; Love of the
sponge that merely imbibes the moisture of amatory
experience and holds it — God knows to what end unless
it is a literary one, in solution eternally ; Heine Love
and Swinburne Love, which is the love of Nature. . . .

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The Flurried Years 219

The Heine Love — " Du hist wie eine Blume " — is, I
think, implicit in this poem. Heine Love, which rises
now and again, gracefully, to passion, as in Ritter
Olaf but mostly homely, cynical, wistful. Not, so far as
I could tell, the love that moves mountains, faces the
seven deaths of boredom, but the mild, watery variety
that, rather than attempt to move the thwarting mass of
opposition, sits down in front of it and repeats the great
word Agony three times, taking up all one line !

He read it out hastily, in a shyness that was almost
shame, hustling off the enormous and useful word, and
we were glad to come back to the " flannel beach " and
the " long, red Rolls-Royce," and the little paper-shop on
the Place of Lyon.

Love without breadth, depth, or thickness, without
dimension. Subjective, purely. For the object — set up
like an ikon to be worshipped, perfunctorily, with genu-
flections and lip-service, a queen in the game of knights
and castles — any sort of fetish, glittering, shining, com-
pelling, will do.

That was all done. She got ill and left us. In the
autumn we made a pilgrimage to my native Northumber-
land, and I, taking my courage in my hands, bounced in
upon Goneril. I walked into the bedroom of the little
thing where she lay on her little bed, a little ill, and
surprised her into almost cordiality. It did not last,
however ; she told her daughter to give me a cup of tea
downstairs and peevishly dismissed me, saying :

" Let the lawyers thrash it out ! "

They were thrashing it out, to the tune of hundreds
a year, if that was what she wanted ! She was hopeless.
I went back to Durham, where Joseph Leopold and I
attempted, as usual, to amuse and entertain the kind
Canon, grown older and more tetchy. We succeeded.
He said that he never had " had such good entertainment

220 The Flurried Years

in his life." But though he was stout he was unstable
as water. He cut me out of his will two years later and
left all his money to his nurse and his pet verger — at
ninety-six. Oh, these wonderful old men who live
beyond the age of reason !

And when I got home my mother did not know me.
I had only been away a week. She had bronchitis — the
final touch, the mild finale of other more serious illnesses.
Joseph Leopold shared the night nurse's duties, taking
the first shift, sitting by her dressing-table, playing inter-
minable patiences. The doctor asked me if I would
permit of an operation . . . oxygen ... it might pre-
serve her life for a few weeks more. I told him that he
must consult the family, as I dared not myself sanction
the expenditure of three hundred pounds to the estate.
Nothing was done. One morning my maid woke me at
seven, putting her head in the door and saying :

" Nurse says Mrs. Hunt is very bad."

My mother had been a tall, large, wide-faced woman.
As she lay there, breathing with difficulty: of a dull,
ferocious red like a smouldering coal, she seemed a small,
brown, wizened changeling. Her grey hair, matted and
damp, had the effect of a black hood round her shrunken
face with her mouth like a small, round O in it. The
nurse had hold of her hand under the bedclothes. She
looked at me and said :

" A hundred and ten ! She's burning up."

She was on fire. It did not last more than a minute
after that, and I went downstairs and sent Joseph Leopold
to telegraph to Regan and Goneril. At half -past nine
his mother came to me. At ten o'clock Regan came. I
heard her pass upstairs. I sent a message to her as she
stood by her mother's death-bed, asking for a reconcilia-
tion. There was not one. Oh, we Northerners !

At eleven o'clock my solicitor came and informed me
that my mother's will had been put into Chancery. In

The Flurried Years 221

the afternoon I went to my mother's room and gazed
at her in the shell. She looked twice the woman she
had looked when she was dying. Her brow was even,
her mouth closed and firm, her nose sharpish and deter-
mined. She reminded me of Mr. Gladstone, although I
had never seen her look like that in life.

On Monday Joseph Leopold, his mother, and I stood
— we were too restless to sit, and, besides, it would have
been unbecoming to do so while such a thing as this was
happening — and in silence we looked out of the window
that gave upon the little garden and the street. It was
Monday morning. The funeral was fixed to be at Woking
on Tuesday. We were all to be at the London Necropolis
station by eleven. All night she was to lie in a shed,
chill, bare, and cold, in a chill, bare, and cold station . . .
no bright advertisements ... so that it would be handy for
them to shove her to-morrow into the train that we were
all going by. That would be the real funeral. But now
the point was to get her there. A sort of a carriage like
a black beetle, drawn by one horse, was at the garden
gate. There was a noise on the stairs. We heard the
front door opened, and observed a posse of men with
their burden passing quickly down the garden path and
out of the gate. The carriage went off at a cheerful trot
down the hill. It was not the funeral, only getting ready
for it overnight. . . .

" And that's that ! " said Joseph Leopold, with no
intention of irreverence. It was with him as with me —
the sense of what had been a life bobbing away down the
street like a cork upon the ripple of a stream, to be ready
overnight for the ground . . . and the Then. . . .

By Christmas Day we were all, Ezra Pound — taking
great interest in the cooking of a sucking-pig — Mary,
Joseph Leopold, his nephew, and I, installed in a haunted
cottage at Farnham Common which had been lent to
me. I was poor. My mother's money, on which I had

222 The Flurried Years

lived and on a share of which, augmented by my earnings,
I was to live in future, was not immediately forthcoming.
It did not come for four years — a contested will . . .
sisters of the same bed masquerading as strangers . . .
heads averted . . . the sneer courteous . . . macabre
scenes such as one reads of in Victorian novels. And
my Aunt Jane still prayed for me while she prosecuted.

Mary had come back from Giessen, where she had been
almost living at the Johns, with some very queer and
disturbing stories. They were very nice to her — oh,
always ! — and she must be sure to come again ; but there
was some sort of situation. The captain had proposed
and proposed and again proposed — extraordinary conde-
scension for a German — and now was annoyed with her
da sie wollte nicht mein Frau sein. And Walloth talked
to her about Joseph Leopold's affairs. He dimly realised
that gossip about Joseph Leopold would be a passport
to her interest. He hinted vaguely at conspiracies—
against the money of Joseph Leopold, of course — and
he heard John say that he would jolly well make old
Hueffer sweat, i.e. pay.

Mary didn't know — for Herr John naturally never
spoke to a woman about business — that there was some
actual estrangement between the two men. John had
kicked against the delay in the despatch of the last
instalment — so Joseph Leopold fondly hoped — of his pay-
ments. I knew that Joseph Leopold had received a paper
informing him that a certain Paul John, of i Seltersweg,
Giessen, had " posted " him for the sum of £80 in a
London bank — made over his debt to the bank, so I
understood . Joseph Leopold had written stiffly, enclosing a
cheque — "hoping that this is your last charge against me."

Cherchez la femme ! Mary was innocent as the day.
Linchen was as rusee as they make them. She was very
fond of Joseph Leopold, but, at the same time, resented

The Flurried Years 223

Herr Walloth's defection. Her husband was, on the
other hand, tant soi feu jealous of her cult for the
Englishman. She went with Mary every day to talk
to the Rabichs and see to 15 Friedenstrasse, dust
the pictures, attend to the window-boxes and put fresh
flowers in the vases. Linchen had promised to go on
doing it after Mary had gone until Joseph Leopold
returned, as he must do, to fulfil the conditions of his
naturalisation and do just what Dr. Westlake had said.
Joseph Leopold had better put in a good six months more.
The Rabichs were dying to have him back. He had
given them leave to sub-let discreetly to some lady
student at the University or nurse at the Klinik, but
they had not chosen to do it.

The idea of the little German Frau, who, indeed, looked
far more like a French governess, with her blunt mouth,
sharp nose, and small eyes, pottering about the empty
halls of the absent Englander amused me and explained
much. It would not be odd if John, jealous, and dis-
liking Joseph Leopold, getting as much out of him
as he could in the money way, was not so particularly
anxious for him to go back to Giessen.

But he just must. I was not any more the flesh-pots
of Egypt to him, but he was amiably staying on in
England neglecting his affairs in order to help me over
the settling of the affair of my mother's estate. Though
it bored him, hindered his work, brought him into
contact with all sorts of disagreeable people, even though
it broke him, he would stay to see me through. A
quite fallacious notion ! I should never be through,
and, even if I were, it would not be with his help. He
didn't help ; he was like a dog in a game of skittles ;
he was even getting into mischief. . . .

I sent him back to Germany.

I was glad my mother was dead. Her " nice, quiet

224 The Flurried Years

book " had been a boomerang, and had returned to me.
It had not even done for me what she had intended
since it had been ordered that the money it earned
should be paid into court. And it had got Mr. Byles
and the journal in which he took such a pride into the
most horrible hot water. For months I had watched
that insect of a case crawling up the list in the Telegraph,
and one day I looked at the list for the last time, it was
down for hearing. And I had imagined fondly that
I, I alone, might square it !

Absurd ! My novelist's sagacity was deeply at fault.

I damned the Germans and all their works a hundred
times a day. That comedy of jealousy in a little, obscure
town in Germany, that three-cornered love duel which
Mary had hinted at, was that going to stymie things
over here in England ? It could not be money. But,
if it was, why hadn't I forced Joseph Leopold to be
quick with his cheque, instead of dawdling till the anxious
German gentleman had had recourse to such legal
facilities as are at the disposal of foreign creditors ? I
was restless, because I wanted to get to Germany and
see for myself what they were all about. Mary Martin-
dale was going back, but not yet ; there was no actual
breach with the Johns. . . .

Joseph Leopold was coming as far as Boulogne to
take me back to Giessen the moment the case was heard.
It would be nothing.

But I did what Mr. Byles advised. He was less
optimistic than I. I lunched with his chief one day at
the Connaught Rooms, and I begged him over the
luncheon-table to permit me and my social interests
to be subordinated to the interests of the paper. I
thought I was strong enough to stand it. My friends
would kindly ignore any apology that he chose to insert,
and put the matter out of their minds. But the objec-
tion, oddly enough, came from the editor himself,

The Flurried Years 225

unexpectedly on a high editorial horse. He wasn't
going to deface his pages with apologies ; it would
be ridiculous. He was not much concerned with
the amenities of my drawing-room existence, which
was interfering with those of Fleet Street. Bless him,
he wasn't responsible for the Birth, Death, and other
certificates of Society ladies who wrote novels, and were
lucky enough to be reviewed in his paper and share the
sweet uses of advertisement with men who had their
living to get by their tale of thousand words. And the
expense of bringing over people from Germany might
easily be as heavy as any possible damages that might
be granted against him. The idea of his being fined for
negligence in studying the dossier of everyone to whom
he afforded a free advertisement ! He didn't even know
if his " sub " wasn't a ticket-of-leave man or a " clink."

What was I to do ? His line of defence or absence of
defence did not appeal to me. He refused to apologise.

I went about in that fog-bound February . . . see-
ing about my new book The Celebrity's Daughter, dipping
into this or that lawyer's office, lunching with Mr. Byles
and Mr. Comyns Beaumont ; to parties at my three
clubs ; to stay with Mrs. Stringer. I was very " gay."
. . . But it was all forced, a worthy affectation of
indifference — indifference to the social result, perhaps,
of this particular trial, for by that time, as the nurses
say, I had been given something to cry for.

The nail of one sorrow is sometimes effective in driving
out another, so I once wrote, apropos of some trifle, to
Henry James — a speech rather near the knuckle of the
life-problems of which dear Mr. James always so depre-
cated the discussion. Strangely enough, his sympathies
had been then aroused, and he had riposted with his
first invitation to me to stay with him at Rye, so that,
with walks and talks, he might console me. But discuss

Pv

226 The Flurried Years

or even hear for what it was he was consoling me — not
he!

And the next thing was — Postponed ! For a week !
And Joseph Leopold, torn from Germany where he
ought to be, waiting for me at the Hotel Dervaux in-
stead ! I made a lightning dash across, taking my new
book to show him.

A funny colony of English we made that night in the
depressing lounge — British ugliness and French discom-
fort (i.e. no arm-chairs). With death in our hearts
Joseph Leopold and I tried to wake them up and made
them play games — French and English. To one stately
lady who seemed to take an interest in me, I lent my new
book. The Hotel Dervaux was being remodelled. Half
of it was under flapping canvas, and the draughts as
you went to your room were awful. Joseph Leopold
had caught cold already. He was very anxious to get
back to Giessen, for he had been asked to dinner to meet
the Grand Duke, and he wanted to keep up appearances
and please the potentate who had been graciously
pleased to accept him. I imagined Joseph Leopold
spending summers at Nauheim in his train . . . wearing
orders . . . court poet and what not — all sorts of local
compensations for exile. . . .

Next day there was a telegram. One word, " To-
morrow." And there was a storm, and the sea was
raging and waves miles high. There was no need for
me to go to England, but I thought I would. I waited
till the last boat in case the sea went down a little, yet
I didn't care very much what became of me. My going
was just a foolhardy act that would do nobody any good,
not even myself, but I didn't want to be done good to.
I had a sort of feeling that the Throne defence would
fail. Why — why couldn't they have gone into the
thing properly ?

The Flurried Years 227

I sat there, wrapped up as well as I could be in a
corner on deck, watching with intentness like a cat at a
mouse-hole, the waters swirling backwards and forwards
into the scuppers, to distract my mind. It was quite
distracted enough. I could not even think of being
sea-sick, lying crouched up on the bed — of roses — I had
made. No, it was nails ! A la Henry James !

My enemies, what were they thinking and saying ?
What doing ? What further trouble was being manu-
factured for me ? This affair would certainly start some
more. And it came when I was more helpless than ever.
Mary Martindale was all the sister I had, and my mother
was dead. Joseph Leopold

I stood all next day in the hall of his sister's house,
my ear glued to the telephone. They brought me
nourishment, and his mother lent me a smelling-bottle
she had bought at Justus Christ's, the Giessen apothecary.
About eleven o'clock my solicitor, speaking from court,
asked me if I would let counsel watch the case for me as
" dreadful things were being said." I agreed. I lunched
with them all, and at five I went home, bought a paper,
and read the evidence. It did not seem to me very fair
or very true, but I believe that counsel are privileged to
say what they like in court,1 and reporters to report
what they like, and printers to print what they like.

The next day the same procedure at Brook Green.
That second day I had very little notion how things
had gone, and, for some reason or other, I could not
procure a paper as I went home. I sat still for a long
time in the dark, in the empty dining-room at home,
alone. . . . The servants, shamefaced, pretended they
had not heard me come in, and did not come near
me. I was afraid to know what had happened in the
Strand, though if I had had a paper handy, I should have

' I am wrong; I am told that counsel are privileged to say, not what they like, but
what they are instructed to say. Exactly.

228 The Flurried Years

looked. But I did not feel equal to going down the hill
again to get one. Perhaps they were sold out ? Perhaps
the case was not over? I got into a rage there in the
dark. It ought to have been somebody's business to
tell me. I had friends there who must have known
what I was feeling. Where were they all ? In a sudden
panic I turned on the light and flew to the telephone.
It was six-thirty. Everybody I asked for seemed to be
away. At last I got hold of the gentleman in the City
who is kind enough, yearly, to put my income tax in
order, as he was leaving his office. " You're wanted
on the 'phone, sir." He must have been just putting
on his overcoat and cursing the person who was retaining
him. His first accents were irritable . . . then he
apprehended me. . . .

"Is it left to me to tell you ? . . . I am more than
sorry. . . ."

His news must be bad ; I pressed for particulars.

Three hundred pounds damages ! Oh, poor Byles !

And then I realised that I had not for a moment
supposed that the Throne would lose — not for one
moment ! It seemed, on the face of it, rather absurd
that a paper should have to prove its knowledge of all
the recondite circumstances of a person's career before
venturing to dilate on it. An editor of a paper knows
no more of his clients than a man who is introduced to a
woman at a dance knows whether she has a husband in
the room or not — unless, indeed, he is sufficiently inter-
ested in her to ask, and then perhaps she amuses herself
with not telling him the truth. Without having recourse
to Stubbs, he cannot be sure how many times she has
been convicted of forgery. Neither does she know
whether he happens to be an undischarged bankrupt
or no. This is socially speaking ; I am aware that beyond
Temple Bar these things have a deeper significance.
I have been told that a good many papers timidly

The Flurried Years 229

expressed this view, clothing, as Rabelais his unaccep-
table, rack-deserving political views in filth, in my case
with ribaldry — " How happy could he be with either " ;
and another, " It now costs three hundred pounds to
call this lady by the name she assumed " ; or another,
" A name ? What's in a name ? Heavy damages."

That night, slightly sleepless, I thought of many things —
Might have beens . . . Panaceas. . . . But chiefly of
the terrible incidence of money in civilised — or, if
you will have it, decadent — human affairs. For savages
delightfully settle their current sexual differences with
clubs — or maybe a little poison. Fredegonda, the wife
of Clovis, in Tadema's picture, painted when he was
under the influence of the Pre-Raphaelites — a large,
countrified, fine woman, her hard face crowned with
red roses, her heavy eyes gloating on the figures of
Galeswintha and Clovis standing hand in hand before
the High Priest of the Gauls . . . boys swinging censers
according to some savage rite or other . . . Galeswintha,
the new love of Clovis. . . .

But the Loves of the Gauls are not practical politics.
Money was not the weapon in those days, but the scythed
chariot and the funeral pyre.

Well, it was Joseph Leopold's funeral, and it was not
properly reported, anyway. Did someone really say,
as I was told over the telephone that very night by one
of the witnesses — poor, compunctious Maleine — that he
had left his children to starve? That would hurt. The
man would cheerfully have died sooner than take them
away from a school of an opulence far beyond his means,
where he had put them so that they should be brought
up in the faith of their fathers and receive, as well as
religion, the benefits of living in the highest possible
state of social amenity.

I got a paper next morning and saw that in effect,
the evidence must produce the other impression on the

230 The Flurried Years

minds of the jury. Counsel's words, as reported, did not
give the word " starve," but do reporters always report ?
And I saw also that by the — shall I say the courtesy of
the judge ? — a protest quelconque had been got in. " All
that was possible," since I was not represented.

Letters from my three clubs — natural enough ! And
one from a very old friend, Archibald Bence- Jones,
Barrister-at-Law, putting me wise about the legal bear-
ings of the verdict. I needed not to be down-hearted.
Mr. Bence- Jones and his wife were Society people. He
grasped, perhaps better than most, the implications of
this trial, which might both alienate my clerical relations
in the North and strengthen the hands of my enemies in
the South. Why should Mr. Justice Avory — why should
any Mr. Justice Anything — know that I was fighting for
my life— since money is the life — with people who thought
I was not entitled to the very means of existence ! Even
Mr. Bence- Jones did not know that. I did not worry
Society or my friends with my legal difficulties — what
decent woman does ? And though he was not merely a
Society friend, he realised the enormous importance of
attacks on one's social prestige. I must not on any ac-
count let this sort of thing interfere with my heretofore
butterfly existence. I must come to dinner next Thurs-
day to meet Lord Fitzmaurice and Sir Lauder Brunton.
Followed a list of useful, social, compelling names. . . .

You cannot count — that is, you cannot reckon — with
the English synthesis of morality, but one must bear in
mind that it is Mr. and Mrs. Grundy ; that the great
mind of England, male and female, thinks true and alike
about those subjects. That is, it hardly thinks at all ;
it feels — a little. The English, taken all in all, are the
most frivolous nation — that they are more frivolous than
the Germans everyone perhaps would concede, but not,
as I submit, that the English are a great deal more
frivolous than the French. You never know the way

The Flurried Years 231

the cat bearing the standard of British virtue will
jump. This frivolity is evidenced, I think, in the tons
of volumes of cheap, shoddy memoirs of people really
important, or important in their day, that are put upon
the market every year and devoured by British readers
who do not object to the life-history of a cocotte, suppos-
ing she is historical and robbed the nation, say, under
Charles II, while Defoe's Roxana, the history of a common
whore who flourished at the same time, lies perdu on
local library shelves. Pious readers in France read,
from paper cover to cover, a solid history of the Prince
de Ligne or of the Duke de Broglie or of Benjamin Con-
stant for which the authors have ransacked archives and
public libraries, and have furnished copious notes. The
French must read them, for they buy them. These
books would be unsaleable in England, where they like
" nice, quiet books," and memoirs of greatish men on
whom the limelight must indeed play, but not too fiercely.
It is desired, I have heard, by maiden ladies, to keep
Rossetti, a poet, a paladin. . . .

Everything in England, especially feeling, it seems,
can be reduced to terms of musical comedy. Crowds
listen with tears in their eyes to that song, so cynical
and touching, " If you were the only girl in the world,
and I were the only boy." But she isn't and he isn't ;
he knows it and she knows it ; and when the apple-cart
upsets the courts are there to adjust matters. Why does
Miss Sybil Thorndike's clever Joan — a concession to
convention at the best — stir the English soul as Sarah
Bernhardt's Jeanne d'Arc, grand, simple, quiet, and dull,
so to speak, in the poor version she chose to play in,
could never do ? For Deep calls to Deep and no one
hears — in England !

Why is George Robey, and why was Marie Lloyd, the
darling of the people, except that this bastard passion,
this casually touched sentiment, easily assuaged, appeals

232 The Flurried Years

to the heavy but frivolous homme tnoyen sensuel — and don't
let us forget the femme tnoyenne sensuelle — that English
men and English women are, detesting insistence, hating
detail and all serious writing — scorning le mot juste, enfin ?

Thackeray, commenting on the Englishman's conduct
of his love-life, observed it. " When the Englishman
gets off his knees he goes away." And when the English-
man goes into war he reads in the trenches Comic Cuts
and La Vie Parisienne, while all the German officers have
Wilde and Nietzsche in their pockets, the English wives
at home reading Sir Philip Gibbs as against Henri
Barbusse.

Well, never should I be able to make an Englishman
think — as Henry James said a motor-car would do when
it came ! — at any rate think as I do and realise the point
of Mr. Bence-Jones. For, as I have said, I believe the
famous " fair play " notion to be just a mask for frivolity
and an insane distaste of going into matters. The
Englishman prefers to judge things " on the face of
them," but the face lies. He takes what he calls an
all-round view, and that is to say a partial squint at the
problems which are past his comprehension, but have
yet to be taken into account in the scheme of things.
He is quite willing for the sake of sentiment as we all
should be to let pass, throned in his Palace of Law, a
Master in Lunacy, who cannot even see the faces of the
litigants brought before him.

I had been before the old gentleman a week ago ; he
smiled benignantly, after having had papers read aloud
to him and hearing the evidence of us all for about an
hour, on a desert which he was pleased to call a peace.
He was delighted, he said, as we all in the persons of
our representatives sat round him, longing to be at each
other's throats, but reculant pour mieux sauter, that the
family dispute was ended.

But I had to go back to Boulogne and attend to my

It

i

n

The Flurried Years 233

invalid . . . mend him up and send him back to
Germany, where his work was cut out for him. He
must buck up and be practical ... he must bustle John
. . . get those papers. I didn't quite like what Mary
had told me about the Johns. It sounded as if there
might be all sorts of difficulties. Well, I must overcome
them, and Joseph Leopold must do his part.

Next morning Mr. W. L. George and Maleine, who had
been in court, came to see me, and Mary Martindale to
accompany me to Charing Cross for Boulogne. Poor
Mary was hysterical. She nearly collapsed at the station
when she saw our portraits, very large, on the placards.
I said stonily, putting half a crown into her hand, " Buy
them all." It gave her something to do. I got into the
carriage — there was only one place left — and bestowed
myself, and presently Mary, her red lips trembling, her
large white face like a rock with the rain running down
it, came up bearing sheaves of papers, which she handed
o me. I kissed her out of the window. She was going
o live at South Lodge for a little while. She had no
ome now, except in Yorkshire with her aunt, Mrs.
Stringer, who had lent her to me in my great need.

Then I opened the papers one by one, swallowed my
gruelling, and digested it. Five people opposite me were
reading papers on the back sheet of which was my portrait
— the one by Hoppe. It was not in the least like me ;
Mr.Hoppehad considerately given them one for reproduc-
tion which would not give me away. I had sat to him
about fifty times. At any rate, no one seemed to
recognise me. Indeed, supposing I had been a wanted
criminal, with police portraits posted up in front of every
police court for my identification, I daresay I should,
as my mother would have said, " got cannily away."

The train moved out of the station. I had not the
face to read my own papers, and thus appose my likeness
in the Daily News to another example of Mr. Hoppers

234 The Flurried Years

talent in the Daily Sketch, read by the stolid man sitting
on the other side of the carriage. My apparent non-
recognisability struck me as quite a good tip for a story
— a shocker — and I began to invent a plot. It might
soothe me, and make me a cheerful companion to the
person I was going to, more stricken than I, and who
now had need of me. I was to be nursetender to the
sore heart — sore about a variety of things . . . not about
me any more.

Perhaps, like the wife of Richard III at the bier of her
murdered lord, my face " was much abused with tears,"
and unrecognisable. Mary had not done all the crying.

How should I tell him ? Leaving his children to starve !
That was what it came to. The rest didn't matter much.

It was quite dark when I got to Boulogne, and raining.
Joseph Leopold met me. I was too tired and too much
upset to speak, nor did he as he put me into a carriage
and we began to drive up the steep street to the hotel
on the heights of the town. Then I found he couldn't ;
he had lost his voice completely. The doctor had for-
bidden him to come out but he had done so and very
much annoyed he was about it. I said I could have
got up the hill alone. When I recovered and could talk
I tried to tell him all about the trial, but he absolutely
forbade me to, said he didn't want to hear a word about
it, and with lack-lustre eye, from his bed, sipped the
soothing potions of Dr. Lavigne and watched me stow
all the newspapers in the bottom of my trunk. The
doctor came, and said to me in the passage outside that
monsieur was not so very ill, but in such a highly excited
condition that it had flown to his chest. He had been
delirious, he said, last night. I had better not trouble
him with des affaires until he asked to be so troubled.
Let him start a discussion of anything unpleasant. I
think Dr. Lavigne knew all about it. He could speak
a little English, and probably read the Paris Daily Mail.

The Flurried Years 235

Next day I went down to breakfast — in this French
hotel English tastes were catered for. The large, import-
ant lady to whom I had lent my new novel, just out three
days ago, sauntered up to the table where I was eating
my sole and laid the volume down on the table beside me.

" There's your book, Miss Hunt ! "

She stalked away to her finnan-haddock, and it was
Coventry in the Hotel Dervaux until the doctor allowed
us to go. And when he did let us go, it was to the South
of France. " Monsieur avail lapoitrine legerement atteinte."

I had never been farther south than Paris in my life
before. It was the usual revelation to me. I hate
revelations everybody else has had ; every gambler
with a system, every Jew with a fortune, every cocotte
with her saison a faire, everybody with a chest, has
known what it is to awaken in that early morning and
see those cypresses and those goats . . . the blue waters
of Cette and the flowers of Nice. We got to a quiet
place called Montpellier which Conrad had written to
recommend. Years ago he had written to Joseph
Leopold from thence, saying it must be seen in winter
and in January. This was February. He had raved
— Joseph Leopold asserted there was no other word for
it — like a miss or a schoolboy about the beauty of the
land and the delicacy of the colours at sunset and sun-
rise. He had owned to missing Joseph Leopold more
and more, for " with no other man " except the inheritor
of the great Pre-Raphaelite tradition of colour could he
share this rapture. Drunk with colour, he would have
liked Joseph Leopold there to lean on. He had told
me, when I asked him about Montpellier, of the villages
perched on conical hills, standing out all round against
" the great and weeping lines of violet ranges as if in an
enchanted country," and that it was " magic, all subtle
and of colour alone." I never had thought of Conrad as a
potential colourist ; he seems to me, in his work, to use

236 The Flurried Years

merely conventional terms of colour ; but that one
phrase, " great and weeping lines of violet ranges ..."

I fancy that he was impressed, as a child is, by the
glories of a printed picture-book, in which chromatic
shades have been lavishly used. And, at any rate,
Montpellier was a wash-out, ugly and ordinary, memor-
able merely as the place where we lost our luggage.
Joseph Leopold was forced to admit that Montpellier
must have changed a good deal since Conrad's time ;
it was the tamest of white places, and the violet ray at
even conspicuously absent.

We went on to Carcassonne, where rabies was raging
and all the inhabitants rushing up in droves to Paris
for the ministrations of Pasteur. I was nearly bitten,
my sympathies being too much with the dog, wild,
maddened, chased down the street by a gendarme on a
bicycle with a levelled gun. It snatched at my leg,
happily long skirted, as it flew past to be killed at the
next carrefour by a pitchfork that another blue-coated
brigand, stationed there, flung at him. I had read John
Galsworthy's story in the English Review — perhaps the
dog was only being driven mad by agony ?

I did not get rabies from my scratch, though the dog
star was raging. But I am under Scorpio, the star of
artists and harum-scarum people generally.

I begged for our horoscopes up to date from my
versatile doctor. Hopeless! Nothing good for either of us.
Herschel in the ascendant ! Joseph Leopold's aspects
" between the devil and the deep sea," and mine " not
much better." "Oh, you Scorpio people ! " the dear
woman exclaimed. But Scorpio people, though erratic,
are sometimes lucky, and, anyway, we always fight the
stars when they are against us.

The stars against ! I used to sit at the window over-
looking the hotel garden and watch them in the cold
clearness of the night, when the mistral blew the boughs

I

The Flurried Years 237

of the plane-trees like a ragged, jagged curtain, across
the steely blue like the coat of a gendarme. No, there
never is any help in the stars.

The soil of the hotel garden was like the bread of
Provence, pasty, leathery, flaky, and unappetising.
There were white cats hanging about at odd times there
— sometimes one, sometimes three, according as they
died or hid themselves in the brake to suffer — sitting
with ridgy backs along the wall. The Plongeur, a
Spaniard, threw them about the plongeon where he washed
the dishes. Joseph Leopold wrote all day on the table
in the study they had given him — the lid of the bath
in the bathroom, " so seldom used." He had a horror
of the return to Germany, where I was egging him on
to go. And yet he was not happy here. Can anyone
be happy or beloved with the mistral blowing and the
live leaves of litigation blowing in at every post ?

Of my pending Chancery suit I did not like to think.
Yet I did. I was as full of nerves as he. Nerves —
the heart's division ! We forced a calmness that spoke
less of emotion controlled than an utter atrophy of all
the springs of feeling. We hardly spoke to each other
that month as we walked or climbed. Les Baux, the
city of the dead, depressed us immeasurably ; the
veritable Chateau d'Amour that I discovered left us
cold as its hearthstone, open to the stars. He picked
up a small, live scorpion among the ruins of the Presence
Chamber, where the Courts of Love were held, while I
collected the pieces of a glass jug, iridescent with age,
period Francois Premier, in the kitchen midden of the
Comtesse de Champagne. The small scorpion, no bigger
than my little finger nail, lived to visit England and be
interviewed by German professors.

I understood now what Conrad had said about the
prevailing wind of Provence, warning me of its knife-
blade of cold that seemed to pierce in between one's

238 The Flurried Years

very vertebrae, telling me also that I should not altogether
dislike it, though it had half killed him in "a not
unpleasant, languorous, melting way ... a gently active
numbness." No, I did not mind it. But it did not
inspire me as it seemed to inspire him. I was not "sunk
in dreams — visions — of innumerable tales," or " floating
in an atmosphere of voluptuously aching bones." So
he had said. I rather approved of this wind's periodical
visitations. For there seemed to be no dust-carts in
St. Remy or in Aries, or in Provence generally ; the
waste-paper baskets of the Middle Ages, unemptied,
the sale or return newspapers, lie all round the walls of
Aigues-Mortes. And if the mistral did not come some-
times and blow them away most of the towns of the Midi
by now would be like Les Baux, where the air is fetid
still, though there is nothing alive or even putrescent
except perhaps in the museum, where lies, under a glass
case, the Cabellodouro d'oro, the ever-golden, springing
hair of a Provencal maiden that for many years, I was
told, swung untarnished as the sign of the inn of that
name till antiquaries rescued it.

Conrad wrote that he was jolly glad that Joseph Leo-
pold had got on terms of inspiration with Provence. He
could not tell Joseph Leopold how happy he and his wife
were to know that their friend was at peace at last. In
a little cahier de vers that Joseph Leopold sent him he
thought he saw a sort of deeper vibration. Deeply
interested in that something additional, he was yet glad
to find Joseph Leopold unchanged. He himself was
working at a novel laid aside some years ago. I think
it was Chance. He said it was a beastly job, and he had
no elasticity. He didn't care if it did well or not. He
had been too long at the game, and was heartily sick of
it. The feeling that life " is no longer worth the candle,"
but " altogether a beastly grind."

The old ritournelle ! But Joseph Leopold's letters and

The Flurried Years 239

mine did, said he, cheer a man who had no longer " the
consciousness of doing good work."

It was like old times to hear the jeremiad d'occasion
that all authors put up now and again. E pur si muove !

I sent a little crate of oranges from the South to the
father and mother and to the boy Jackolo, a whole
branch of a cherry-tree, crystallised, fruit leaves and all,
as it came off the bough in a mask of white sugar,
like an early spring snow shower, from the shop of Justin
Lilamand with the lovely name. They reminded me of
the Cabellodouro d'oro — something that had been alive,
now sealed in a tomb of glistering crystal. But not any
more. Conrad wrote to say that Jackolo's teeth were
in it at the time he was writing to thank me — the pathetic
dark spray all dull and earthy once you break off its
mausoleum. And I said that we were coming home, and
he wrote that his first duty would be to present himself and
make his bow in my drawing-room . He professed himself —
Conrad ! Que d'honneur ! — extremely anxious to do so for
the sake of the almost incredible sensation of duty combined
with pleasure that would be his. " Never happened to me
before." He didn't think it could be ; " smacks of a fairy
tale ! " Well, he was going to live through it presently.

And my other mentor was not backward in reassuring
me as to my reception. There was no collusion. They
were, I fancy, hardly acquaintances. The sailors' toast —
" Our wives and mistresses, may they never meet ! " —
would have suited admirably the respective sommites
of Conrad and Henry James.

" To Grand Hotel de Provence,
" St. Remy de Provence.

"21 Carlyle Mansions,
" Cheyne Walk, S.W.
" March yth, 1913.
" My dear Violet, — Yes, I have been intermittently

240 The Flurried Years

and miserably ill — and have to write short letters in
consequence. I am hoping I have really emerged a
little, but everything is difficult yet. I am wintering
and staying on in London on a more settled basis than
for a long time back, and London is on the whole
propitious to me. I am glad to gather that ' abroad '
has practically been so in a still higher degree to you,
in the sense, I mean, of promoting production, publica-
tion, impressions, and what comes of them. May it all
be ' blessed ' to you. If only one could arrive at clim-
ates without a big struggle towards them, I should
emulate your great push southward. But I have to
make the best here of rather a fine hang in that direc-
tion over the reeking, beguiling, romantic river. You
seem to me to be in very pleasant places ; I could do
with them. I congratulate Ford on the intermission
of his torture (for me it has been such) of blighted,
frustrated work. Well, patch with purple if you
must, so long as the piece holds.

" Yours, my dear Violet, ever

" Henry James."

I patched furiously with purple, if my old friend would
have it. I abandoned the part of Poor Miss Flite ; I had
played her for all she was worth last year and the part
had cost me dear. The affairs of Joseph Leopold were,
and of course they must be, of primary importance.
This year I suppressed all my own disagreeable letters —
letters relating to the Chancery suit that was going on
full tilt, and letters from friends, kind and otherwise,
with regard to his and my own recent appearances in
the journals of the United Kingdom. I wished I could
have suppressed the letters he got and all and every
report in the papers. As a result, I am afraid, of one
particular aspersion that had been cast upon him, his
old, old friend, Mr. Marwood, wrote and demanded the

The Flurried Years 241

repayment of four hundred and forty pounds lent long
ago for the purpose of defraying the costs of an operation
in the family of Joseph Leopold. It was paid on the nail.
I was aggrieved at the suddenness of the demand. He
and I had talked of it at Sandgate, and he had said that
he would wait until my ship came in. My ship had not
come in, and his, though I did not know it, was going to
cross the bar. Conrad explained it a little in a letter to
Joseph Leopold — all about money, very businesslike,
and ending with the cant phrase out of Romance with
which this little crowd were wont to signify some degree
of financial pressure, an abject condition of low water. —
" Excellency, a few goats is the state of things here ! "
He mentioned that Marwood had nearly died that winter,
and had been stimulated by this forewarning to put his
house in order — a forgotten instinct which stirs sometimes
even in the bosoms of Bohemia. And Marwood was not a
Bohemian but a country gentleman, who had livestock
and a farm and a wife, and was afraid of another illness
which might finish him, said Conrad, trying to make me
believe that his sudden rough usage of us was not the
result of the recent case. But about that and other
things Marwood had believed what was not, and could
not have been. Of that I was sure, or he would have
written to me, whom he made his pal, before he sent the
formal demand to Joseph Leopold. Neither Marwood
nor anyone who had ever known Joseph Leopold could,
or should, have let themselves believe that he had left
his children to starve.

They might very well have done that, for, tremendously
agitated, oft weeping as only a German can, he could
hardly manage to fulfil his literary engagements. The
quality must suffer: continual jagging tears the horse's
mouth, and the same treatment meted out to a human
being produces " the blighted, frustrated work" of which
Henry James feelingly spoke, so that even a visit to the

Qy

242 The Flurried Years

South of France, to Carcassonne and Corsica, and such
" intermission of the torture " as is implied by these
travellers' joys will not restore the tone — at any rate not
all at once — of the grey matter on which so much —
everything, in fact, for the writer — depends. It had
seemed to me that my last job in life was to aid this
precious substance to recover and find itself able to
produce the tales of bricks — the pounds of flesh — that
life, not to speak of honour and the clinging hands of
children " whose crying is a cry for gold," demanded.

I have read some of the dreary work done by George
Gissing down in a cellar in St. Giles's with not enough
to eat, and I am sure it was not his best. Necessity, in
the case of an author, is by no means the mother of
Invention, and, together with "Endless Agitation," the
wrong sort of excitement, the want of emotional lubri-
cants, starves invention — which is imagination — drives
fancy away from home, and love out of the door.

It was the accusation of neglect, which I for one knew
was unfounded, that lay heavy on his soul. Uncontra-
dicted perforce, of the nature of a privileged communica-
tion yet it was bound to foment his sense of injustice.
Indirectly, of course, though it wasn't my fault, he laid
it to me. He became what is called in society "a bear."

So, when the mad dog, rushing past me in the narrow
street, pursued by the gendarme on a bicycle, gun levelled,
bit at the hem of my white dress as I passed, he made no
comment, nor did I. Not even when I nearly got lost
down the old mine that the Romans used to build Les
Baux with ! It moved him not. We went to Corsica.
He hated it. For, on the Sommet de la Paille, the highest
peak of Vizza-Vona, he opened the letter he had been
carrying about in his pocket for days, and found no
apology — a demand for more money ! Quelle vie !

V. H.

IP- -'I-

19*3

Home again — The London Season — Selsey — A Book with Heart in

The Papers — My Longing — The Rhine Boat again — Four of Us —
Germany's Attitude — Queer — Difficulty in finding an hotel — Manu-
factured delays — Hermeskeil in the Eiffel — Concealed Army Corps —
Shadowed — Metz — Arnold Bennett's Book Impounded — The Man on
the Box — Backwards and Forwards across the Frontier — foseph
Leopold's Alternatives — " Fight against France or be shot " — Adieu
Papers — Giessen my Canossa.

Home, and my yearly garden-party never so well
attended. Cabinet Ministers, by Jove ! Dinners in the
House. Fetes champetres at the Monds' in Lowndes
Square, Henley with the Harmsworths, the Cabaret
Club and all the charming artist rabble who were on the
top of the vogue, and then to the cottage we rented at
Selsey.

A gorgeous season. I wished my poor old mother had
been there to see it. I wished — what did I not wish ?
That Maleine was not there to see it, that the Beauty was
that Goneril still loved me . . . that everyone did
ot hate me !

Give a dog that bad name of commerce, and he becomes
at least capable of small treasons, medium crimes and
futile, forgivable stratagems.

I had now my preoccupation, something I wanted to
pull off. It did not need money — at least, not much.
It needed a journey, simply.

Joseph Leopold was very busy. He was writing a
book — a very good book it was going to be ; for it was
going to contain something quite unusual for him ; there
would be " heart " in it. I was writing one of my novels,
too, in which he always said there was too much heart —
that is to say, sentiment. I talked of my plan in the

243

„

244 The Flurried Years

evenings. Joseph Leopold listened politely ; but then
he always did. His attention was never any sign of
interest. It was an old story, and even a new story grew
old very quickly to him. He never did start a game, a
book, or even a love-affair, that he did not lose interest
in before he came to finis. Death! He said it all came
to a head then. He cultivated that curious laisser alter
notion of shrugging off all to the last, so that, until a
man lay on his death-bed, shriven and his peace made
with God, he did not himself realise what had been his
goal, his object in life, his heaviest sorrow, and eke which
woman he loved the best. This idea, later on, when he
was in the Army, he erected into a philosophy. And
then, as with the heroine of the Laxdala Saga, it might
easily turn out that " I did the worst to him I loved the
most ! " These are the words that William Morris, the
bluff saga-man, out of his profound philosophy that he
got into the defence of Guinevere and of all women, puts
into the mouth of Gudrun when she is old and her grown-
up son questions her.

As for his books, Joseph Leopold knew perfectly well
the place, as it were, where they broke their backs, where
he lost touch with his idea or went off at a tangent and
began to hurry up because he was so tired of it. He
always wanted to tear them up when they were done.
The Good Soldier had a very narrow squeak of it, but
there was perhaps a good emotional reason for that. . . .
I found the sheets that she had written at his dictation
in the dustbin at the bottom of the orchard in a hundred
pieces, and it took me a week to mend each one separately
and send to a publisher.

These tags, these jagged finials of his life, loose-trailing
into space ! Life, a series of affairs ! And one is left
with the last affair on one's hands ! . . .

But I was different. I had finished this — there was
thai — and what I wanted now was to go to Giessen. The

The Flurried Years 245

Mastermans talked of a holiday all four together, and I
suggested that we should go to Germany, down the Rhine
in the Rhine boat, which I had done so often.

I painted glowing pictures of it — I could still glow.
C. F. G. should study the workings of the Insurance Act
which he had helped Mr. Lloyd George to inaugurate,
and for which he was now perhaps bearing the penalty in
unseatedness. We would go in September. Joseph
Leopold would take tickets for the fifteenth.

Before we left England we went to see Maleine in a
nursing-home. She had had a terrible operation. It
was a bad send-off.

We all dined together on the fourteenth. Like the
Irishman, who got up at eight and thought it was seven
and found it was nine, we discovered, when the coffee
was going round, that we must start to-morrow instead
of the day after, so I spent the rest of the evening packing.

The striped roofs of Rotterdam again, the tranquil
pastures of Holland . . . Emmerich, the German
frontier, dinner there. Plenty of occupation on board ;
a lovely young English girl being taken back by her
sprightly mother to school in Mannheim ... we frater-
nised. We all got off together and dined at Cologne, and
watched the noble family of Stollwerck spreading them-
selves all over the plush-covered lounges of their Hotel
Ernst, dressed up to the Paris nines, and their proud
pulpy noses sticky with natal chocolate. Their young
men, in a casual manner, held them embraced. They
were stout, and their dresses were made of filmy georgette,
the newest thing . . . their lovers' large spatulous hands
sank in. . . .

But it was not the same. Germany and the Germans
were the same, but their attitude was different. The
German temper was queer, as we found out the first time
we landed. I should have called it sulky. I was myself

246 The Flurried Years

inclined to be sulky, and had declined absolutely to get
off at Assmanshausen, where we had stayed two years
ago, and see if young Mr. Garnett's tortoise had arrived
and was now a grandfather. I had made us all decide
to get off, leave the boat finally, at Rudesheim. At
Dtisseldorf Joseph Leopold took the others ashore to
show them the industrial sights of Duisberg and Essen,
while I went on with the luggage, alone, to take rooms at
Rudesheim. No one waved at Boppard, but I promised
myself a visit to Mimi later.

I had the most unheard-of difficulty in finding a nice
hotel. Every hotel seemed to be full — certainly all the
nice ones that had been recommended. I secured some
rooms, which I fondly hoped would be temporary, in an
unpleasant barrack kept by a Dutchman, and waited for
the others.

Indefinable, the feeling of estrangement ! After I had
eaten something — flavourless, almost thrown at me — I
walked about on the road between the terraced hotels
and the rushing Rhine. I did not love the Rhine any
more. It did not seem to belong to me. No one wel-
comed me. Nothing tangible, of course ; hotel-keepers
always have an eye to their money ; but it wasn't the
Germany of two years ago, with its funny little harvest
of " 'Tags ! " that met one at every turn, in every shop,
from every village child, from every labourer or beggar
on the road. They were dour two years ago ; they were
sulky now — the very slightest difference, but it told on
me with a sense of impending doom. On the opposite
banks the German forests lay that I had so gloated on
before . . . silent, secret thickets, stretching all the way
to the frontier. . . . Once an army had gone through
them, gone over them somehow — hundreds of army corps
forty years ago on their way to victory at Sedan.

The moment C. F. G. arrived, he disclosed his impera-
tive desire to see the battlefields of Sedan, of Gravelotte

The Flurried Years 247

and Mars-la-Tour. And, of course, we wanted to see them
too. But it took us three days to make a plan. There
seemed to be extraordinary difficulty in getting about.
The landlord — I have said he was a Dutchman, by the
way — was sour and unenterprising. Joseph Leopold
spent an hour or two in looking out trains. It would
take a day. And there was a fine new line just opened
all the way from Posen to the frontier, and, of course,
Sedan.

The landlord, his feelings assuaged when he found that
we were only going for the day and that the arrangements
for the excursion might be, more or less, in his own hands,
became more helpful. There was an Aussicht in the
Eiffel, the first stop of the new railway, Hermeskeil.
Joseph Leopold knew all about it. An altar to Hermes
eminently worth seeing was there. The place was wild
and savage ; up till now it had been inaccessible to
tourists. We might get lunch. He would procure a
carriage.

Late next morning — nearly too late for the train from
Bingen — a carriage was in front of the gate. There
were two men on the box, and one looked rather like a
policeman. Nonsense, Joseph Leopold said, he couldn't
be. The coachman was just giving a friend a lift.

Up hill, through the woods, to this village that had
only recently been opened up. It looked it — as if its
eyes were hardly unclosed, like an untidy, tousled, Ger-
man baby awakened by an English nurse and very much
surprised ! Probably, up here, in the very heart of the
Eiffel, it had never looked on an English face. And
unkempt ! Wet, yellow straw was caught straggling
all over the stones in front of the inn — loose, and coarse,
it was pashed into dun-colour by the hoofs of the oxen
and spread by the webbed feet of the geese all over the
roads. " Why, it's all midden ! " I said.

But we got a delicious Mittagsessen, and then the men

248 The Flurried Years

went out and looked for the Hermes Fountain, waiting
till the train should pass that was to carry us to Metz.
When they came back they told us that there was no
sign of Hermes or his fountain, but that they had
discovered and located two separate army corps round
about this unimportant village, whose brand-new station
was, therefore, not too big for the entrainment of such
numbers of hefty men to be despatched straight across
to the frontier. And the man who had sat on the box
of our carriage got into the train with us, as I pointed
out to Joseph Leopold, who told me not to mention it to
C. F. G., who was beside himself with delight at the idea
of seeing the battlefields. It had been the dream of his
life. So was I — excited to death.

At Metz we got out, and passed through the town to
a sort of depot, where the Dutch landlord had telephoned
for a carriage to be ready to take us to St. Privat, the
first of the holy places we were to see. On our way to
look at the ugly, smug, red Cathedral, we were happy
to be able to oblige a forlorn French party of sightseers
with change — they were suddenly confronted on their
travels with the problem that French money would on
no account go down at Metz. Waiting about, I saw the
luckless President of the Immortelles, as they called him,
and was reminded — as one is, by fits and starts, every-
where in France, as well as by the rustling of the withered
flowers rattling round the statue groups on the Place de
la Concorde — of the slogan of the Lost Provinces : " Give
us back our Provinces ! Give us them ! "

Well, they have got them now and a little bit more !
This strange, predestined, romantic apparition in knee
breeches and buckled shoes was hurrying down the shady
side of the street, his wide, black satin cloak flaring out
to the wind, all the rest of him in mourning for the ancient
loss. The Society was pledged not to wear any but a
sable garb until the restitution, if it ever came.

The Flurried Years 249

He was the first person to be killed when the armies
of Germany occupied Metz.

We waited over an hour for the fly, all four of us,
standing by a wall on which we propped our books
and read. Joseph Leopold had Arnold Bennett's new
book, which the author had sent him. I had a copy
of my new one, titled The Desirable Alien. Suggestive
names both. And when the carriage came the same man
was on the box. Schooled, I said nothing.

We were forced by fussy custodians to give our atten-
tion to the magnificent building that Germany has
erected in order to house a quantity of shards of brass,
of bloodstained rags on which are discernible faint lines
and patches of sodden galoon that once meant rank
and honour. And buttons ! I never saw so many —
all alike. And this disintegrata of heroes is disposed
under glass cases so as to keep the dust off what lay
under the unwinking sky for days in 1870, pulped by
wind and rain till ranks were levelled and the gauds
of officer and private, padded into undistinguishableness.
Nothing like it anywhere, this parterre of heroes'
" cast-offs ! " The toad-like, flattened, humble horror
of it recalling perhaps the rag-picker's yards one sees
going west by train out of Waterloo, or the greasy,
trodden, undistinguished detritus of a rainy Bank
Holiday on the Heath. . . .

And then, having looked reverently into some of these
glass cases and asked a few questions and offered a few
regrets, we were left alone to wander at our will. We
wanted most to see the scene of that so oft-painted
picture, the Church of St. Privat, crowning the long slant
of the hill up from the west that the handful of French
and their poor paper-soled boots held for quite a time
against the might of Germany, sturdy, young, efficient
and fully equipped — so long that it began to seem as if
the day might be theirs. For hours Germany drove

250 The Flurried Years

and flung one brave battalion after another against the
brow of the hill, like waves against a pebbly ridge. And
all to be mown down, as they came on, by the French
handful in their so superior position.

The Germans were buried in heaps, more or less as they
fell — after the ghouls of the battlefields had picked out
such poor valuables as were to be found — under low,
barrow-like mounds, all alike, of the same size, but a
little apart. They are there, neatened every year by
the gardener's scythe. These mounds, like a pattern
slightly raised, in different colours, of a shade greener
than the earthy groundwork, came to represent to my
eyes, dazzled by tears, each a little clump of fives,
desiring desperately, every one of them, to breast the
hill and be at 'em — an Army of mounds ! Dunsinane !
That was what made me weep. Defeated endeavour!
What though the last clump succeeded, entered St.
Privat, and put the little garrison of the church to the
sword? Death got the first clump and more than the
first.

And all the trappings — braids and tabs and discs,
distinguishing marks of the doomed lads who had
swarmed up so gallantly to their deaths — lying level
beneath the dome of this pious building, in receptacles
padded, glass-lidded, formed a subsoil of an outrageous
similarity. No matter. At least, moth should not gnaw
these rags or dust dim these relics of a great moment till
the Judgement Day — or, at any rate, until the French
get to Germany.

The sympathy of England in 1870 was with Germany.
Read Carlyle : " Brave, patient, reasonable Germany ;
peevish, vain France ! " And I have a letter that the
grandfather of Joseph Leopold wrote to my father all
about the tiresome, flippant French, which was an odd
letter for Ford Madox Brown to have written, since he
had French blood in him as well as Scotch and Welsh.

The Flurried Years 251

But he had no Irish blood and no sense of humour.
Joseph Leopold, of course, inherited all these strains
and imported the German element.

We got into the carriage again. The coachman was
in haste to get us back to Metz. He said so, and spoke
of the danger of missing the train. That was pure
nonsense. C. F. G. wanted to drive about on to French
territory, a little way. He said so. Tableau ! But it
didn't matter what the coachman thought. We drove.
C. F. G. had a map of the old frontier and the new. The
frontier had been " rectified " by the victors in a passion
of commemorative spite. Nothing would serve them but
it must be arranged so as to take in all the clumps, every
mound in which a German's body lay, and there were
many larger tumuli dotted about as well as in this mile-
long field we had been surveying. No Frenchman must
possess, or be able even to walk over, the ground that
covered a German. The Fatherland must be increased
to fit this proposition. And a line of frontier like a
wriggling snake, whose every convolution would take
up about a hundred yards, was the result of this
arrangement.

The driver made objections, but we intended to have
our way. It was our carriage that we had hired, and
we were going to pay him — unless he disobeyed us.
A sensible German realised that we had a perfect right
to drive where we liked, having once chartered his
carriage, and he had to give in. A nod from the other
man on the box beside him !

But, indeed, he did it very funnily, in order to plague
us — driving like a snail over German territory, and
whipping up his horse and shaking us to bits when we
happened to be on French. We held the map on our
knees and roared with laughter. When we got into
German territory again he was placable, and showed us
the very place where the German Emperor stood with

252 The Flurried Years

Moltke and Bismarck, watching through their field-
glasses the last decisive charge of the Germans up the
hill, steep as an Alp, of Gravelotte. I climbed it with
Joseph Leopold. It was pretty stiff.

And when we got out of the carriage at the station,
whence we were to go straight back to Bingen for
Rudesheim, we couldn't find either of our books that
we had brought to read in the train. We were late for
the train because, as the driver had said, of our silly
divagations backwards and forwards over the wavy
frontier. Yet the train was still in the station. The
kind, considerate, German stationmaster had actually
kept back the train for us ten minutes. The express
from Metz to Posen— it was like keeping back the Flying
Dutchman or the Riviera Express.

I talked of us all going to Boppard, and I would see
Mimi to-morrow, but Joseph Leopold said I must not
think of it, for we must get away from here — if, indeed,
we were allowed to get away. He was frightfully
pessimistic. The police had it always in their power to
make difficulties — futile ones, perhaps, not letting us go,
say, till they had read through the two seditious volumes
we had had about us and that they had impounded.
That man on the box was a detective, of course. My
new book — all about Germany ! The title, too. . . .

It might be all nonsense, but he'd rather not risk
further incursions into Germany till he and I were alone
again. He would rather not take the responsibility of
letting an English Cabinet Minister be hung up here.

All I had heard and read of the Secret Service came
into my mind. Germany all at once became fremd to
me, as it were the scene of one of Walter De La Mare's
poems. The silence of the forests where we walked at
noonday was now rife with furtive coming and going . . .
full of the sound of hoofs, of pursuers' shouts, of horse-
men— in Prussian uniform — riding up to the door and

The Flurried Years 253

knocking, stamping under the starlight . . . asking for
people to be given up ! Little tame Giessen a danger-
spot, the flat there entered, and, once the good Rabich
terrorised (I could believe no harm of him), ransacked
for papers on intelligence furnished by those who all
along had been, not hospitable, but inimical. And I
had been engineering plans for him to go back there
that he might one day be brought out into the Platz,
where I had so often seen them exercising, and be
shot. ... A little platoon, rifles levelled against the
square sheet of white paper pinned on the breast to mark
the heart— tidy people even in murder ! And it wouldn't
be murder ; it would be justice. He had asked for it.

Insensate fear clutched me, made me want to make
a dash for the coast and a sight of the cliffs of old
England, to have the sea between us and Joseph
Leopold's compatriots whom I had been prepared to
learn to love.

He soothed me. We were all right. We had some
of the might of England with us. We had better,
however, be getting home. We had been behaving rather
incomprehensibly. That driving of yesterday backwards
and forwards across the frontier must have been most
puzzling to our coachman and would give him to think
the worst. You couldn't expect a German peasant's mind
to cope with those of members of the English intelli-
gentzia. Of course, what they had been afraid of was
that we should all get out in French territory, give
them the slip, and they'd lose us whom they had been
shadowing so carefully !

But, I wondered, were we at all valuable to them ?
And he replied with a shrug that it looked like it, since
they had actually stopped a train for us — a State train,
too ! "I wonder who the deuce they think C. F. G.
is ? The English Prime Minister, perhaps ? I'll write
to my cousin Wilder — he's a Hueffer — in Holland to

254 The Flurried Years

send me a paper. They get all the German scandals
there before they even know them here."

I said, " There are plenty of Dutch papers dov/nstairs.
But, even then, I don't see what it all means — this
following and shadowing."

He succeeded in giving me a shock. He was good at
it. First he went very quietly out of the room, came
back again, and, standing up beside my desk in the
military attitude of attention, said :

" It means me — or War."

Him, then! His life! That was it. The knocking
at the door — the search — the compromising papers. . . .
The terror all came back again.

But he was One of Them all right. What could they
do to him ?

Of course, one knew perfectly well that there was
to be war — war some day, not yet ! I remembered the
overturned wheelbarrow left carelessly, as if it might
be wanted soon — the very next minute perhaps — on the
truncated embankment at Malmedy, and Emile
Guilleaume's words. But how if France were to be the
aggressor ? What price the wheelbarrow then ? Joseph
Leopold, earlier in the year, had certainly thought so,
the fruit of many conversations with Monsieur le
Capitaine Taste, Lieutenant de Garnison of the
— Regiment at Perpignan, who shared our table at
Jordy's Hotel in the Cite de Carcassonne.

I had often watched, fascinated, standing in the icy,
snowy, spring weather on the cobblestones of the street
near the east gate of the city, something just like a sortie
— a party of soldiers coming in from the chase. I, an
arrant civilian, never know what the military can be
doing. It was worth while standing there, getting one's
feet wet, in the fall of the light, watching to see suddenly
over the old grey stone parapet the red jerkins and shining

The Flurried Years 255

helmets of little troops of soldiers on horseback, riding
in over the peaked bridge into the city. With a
slight exercise of imagination I could construct the scene
of a whole poem of William Morris's — the chill, black
wold outside the Pale, dappled with patches of retreating
snow, the red against the white, the firm-lipped, deter-
mined faces of the men in their casques, a white girl
captive slung across the saddle . . . and hear the clink
of the bridles ... no one daring to notice . . . the
down-trodden inhabitants of the cite used to the
marauding ways of their defenders. Then they would
go over the drawbridge into the great square donjon
looming strong, stony, in the dusk . . . and the early
dark would close over us all on our castellated peak,
in the plain that Carcassonne is.

I told Le Capitaine Taste that I wanted to see the
castle inside, and he took us there and introduced us to
the Commandant and his Adjutant, a boy with rosy
cheeks who had been in England and who just adored
cricket. They asked us in, and showed us all round and
made much of us. Charming people, but still a cold
centre of revenge, hatred, and sense of the absolute
necessity of feeding it, was implicit in all they said and
all they hinted and all they showed us. In the room
where they dined the vast, bare walls were hung with
tattered banners — banners taken in a hundred fights,
bearing names well known in military history. I cannot
remember the names, but none of them were German.
But on the north side there was a gap — one banner was
gone ! Some words, very clear, were chalked up in its
room : " A Potsdam ! " And underneath : " N'oubliez
pas ! "

This legend of the lost banner and its whereabouts
was chalked up afresh every day. They must go soon
and fetch it. They talked of nothing else. They had
their Tag, too. And isn't Potsdam just beyond Berlin ?

256 The Flurried Years

The boy who had been in England spoke to me as if I
must be in sympathy. . . .

Joseph Leopold would be like a dog in a game of
skittles if it ever came to that. And suppose it came —
Der Tag, that both Germans and Frenchmen would
rejoice in— while he was in Germany ? He was watched
now, as he said — yes, he was certainly shadowed. Only
the other day we all four had been walking in the woods,
and were tired and wanted some tea, but had not seen
any likely place for a long time. Lucy and I had
volunteered to leave the men, who were fairly content
with smoking, and see if we could find a place. Presently
we thought we had come upon it — a biggish house of red
brick in a clearing among the trees. Very true, it was
a house — that is to say, a barracks, not a mile from the
town where there was one already. Lucy's purpose
wilted, but I went boldly up and asked the sentinel on
guard at the gate-house if he could tell me of a place
where we could have tea. The sparrow among the hoofs
of the German army ! Just then Joseph Leopold and
C. F. G., having got tired of waiting, appeared at the
other end of the clearing. The sentinel looked disturbed,
and an officer, I think, in uniform came up and spoke to
me quite severely. I propitiated him, and he sourly
indicated to me a place where I could get what I wanted.

It was a very nice place and a very good tea, but the
man who had given me the indication was sitting beside
us, presumably picking up what we said. He didn't
hear much. Joseph Leopold had shut me up with a
kick under the table and Lucy was always discreet.
Yes, it was a fact. We had never, since we got off the
boat which we had boarded in Holland, taken a step
unaccompanied in Germany, as Joseph Leopold pointed
out to me. But I did want to see Mimi, and pleaded
for one more day on the Rhine, and then we could all
go to Giessen.

The Flurried Years 257

He said languidly :

" All right, dear."

I felt that there was something uncomfortable about
it, something not quite final, and repeated my request
later in the evening.

Then he said, still more languidly :

" Do you want me to be shot or forced to fight against
France ? If you're prepared to risk that, dear, we'll go."

He found a Dutch paper downstairs — or did Alfred
Wilder send it to him ? — and there was a paragraph about
the Renegade who was escorting the English Raj all over
Germany. " We Germans," polite, stopped our trains for
him, showed him our monuments, let him go back to his
land and tell the effete, women-ridden English what the
Germans did for him to show him courtesy. " Him " was
Winston ! . . .

They thought it was Mr. and Mrs. Winston Churchill we
had trailing about Germany with us !

So the dream-Giessen faded out and the dream
rencounter with Herr Paul John. But Joseph Leopold

wasn't going to broadcast his dislike of fighting France
that he had just expressed to me. He just took the
M.'s to Coblentz to show them his country's proudest
possession, Ehrenbreitstein, travelling by rail for quick-
ness, while I to practise my German took all our luggage
to Spa. Joseph Leopold when I parted with him was
like a cosmopolitan stone. . . .

And when Mary wrote she made me think that Joseph
Leopold would not have got much out of the Johns,
anyway. Paul John was turning rather nasty. Paul
John had troubles of his own. She thought that Joseph
Leopold, with her love, had much better stop away from
Giessen for the present, till their panic had died down.
For Paul John had been frightened for his money —
at one time. Then he had "posted" Joseph Leopold

Ry

258 The Flurried Years

and been promptly assuaged. Mary said Paul John
considered Joseph Leopold far too frivolous, and had
not liked his constant sky-larking, dashing about in
motor-cars to Homburg et ceans, just on the very days
that the burgomasters of Giessen elected to go and call
on him. Was he a person likely to be regular with his
rates ? Ach, nein — altogether too French for a German !
The nice judge to whom Joseph Leopold used to give
English lessons was rather " off " him now, and disposed
to think that he would not be an ornament to Giessen.
Not dissipated, of course — that would have been better,
because it would have shown him to be harmless politi-
cally. Just what Joseph Leopold himself had said ! He
was like poor Cassandra, able to prophesy for every-
body's advantage except herself. It was Mary's humble
opinion that Joseph Leopold had better keep away
from his flat for the present, for he would get nothing
out of John just now.

Come off it, both of us ! That seemed to be that !

Germany had been my Canossa, fatal to me. I had
never liked Germans, never felt at home with them. I
hated them, in fact. I was not going to present Giessen
with a pump or leave my bones on the Schiffberg. I was
going to leave my life there, perhaps, which is another
thing.

i9x5

War conditions at Selsey — The Boys — SecondGrim Determination — "England
shall have my old carcass " — A Commission — Joseph Conrad con-
gratulates Joseph Leopold — To be his Executor — Borys Conrad —
Leloffel, Conrad and the Field Glasses — Joseph Leopold in training —
James for England — James's Mistress — His Friend Rupert Brooke —
His Death and Henry James's — Wilfred Ewart — W. H. Hudson —
Plane Trees and Pigeons — A Future Life — His Unbeliefs — Dorothy
Widdrington — Lunch at Whiteley's — My Premonition Realised — Hap-
penings in Kilburn — Broadwater Cemetery — " The Return of tht
Chiff-Chaff."

When war broke out I could not help remembering that
I had lent Leloffel a beautiful pair of field-glasses with
which my father had aided his short sight to pick out the
peaceful details of cottage roof and harbour light and the
perplexing rigging of merchant ships at Whitby. I
dreadfully resented the notion that this cranky Prussian
officer would be using them to pick out our brave boys —
the boys that I entertained and played hockey with at
Selsey where we lived during the first year of the war,
planting useful vegetables in our garden, renewing our
incandescent lamps that the great guns of Portsmouth
in their practising, shivered into fragments, and hardly
daring to open the front door to let out a cat, much less
let in an officer. That was as near as I thought the war
would ever come to me. But it came to be Joseph
Leopold who wanted those glasses, Joseph Leopold who
stung by the sight of those very boys going to be killed,
made up his mind to offer his " comparatively " old
carcass. He forfeited his hard-won nationality, swore
allegiance to King George, and took a commission in the
British Army.

259

260 The Flurried Years

The thing was sprung on me. I went up to meet him

from Selsey, on his returning from town, where he had

been to take some copy to Buckingham House, allotted

to the Ministry of Health. Oddly named, since it was

there men of good will sat all day considering how best to

deprive people of it. I waited at the station gate in the

shrouded darkness of the car. A man I hardly seemed to

know though I knew his coat, with a serviette full of

papers under his arm, got in beside me and said dryly, in

incisive, biting tones that were strange to me, as his

secretary got in after him and covered his speech a little :

" I have got my commission."

Later, when I was lying on my bed crying :

" It is a grim determination . . . the second in my life.

The first was to get you."

And it was just as it had been at Bittong's that evening
long ago — only four years since — when he had returned
from Giessen and, over the dinner-table, had announced
his "grim determination " to remain behind in Germany.
Weak natures only progress like this — by sudden leaps
and bounds. Then, as now, he sheltered behind the
presence of a third person that precluded cross-question-
ing. For, when he told me this dreadful news his secretary
was there and I could not even take his hand. But that
was perhaps what he wanted. " White hands cling
to the bridle-rein: Red lips tarnish the scabbarded
steel. . . ." We rolled along the twisted road from Chi'
to Selsey, to the village that was trying to get rid of him
because he was a German, and he was carrying the
King's Commission in his pocket !

" George, by the Grace of God, of the United Kingdom
of Great Britain and Ireland and of the British Dominions
beyond the Seas, King . . . Defender of the Faith,
Emperor of India . . . To our trusty and well-beloved
Ford Madox Hueffer, Greeting. . . .

THE GOOD SOLDIER

The Flurried Years 261

" Given at Our Court of St. James in the fourth year of
Our Reign."

Joseph Conrad wrote to Joseph Leopold to wish him
luck, full of fellow-feeling as another Englishman who
was going to devote his own son. " Mon cher ..."
" everybody who knows you" will appreciate "the inner
value of your action." Ces gens de metier understand
each other. And Joseph Conrad loved Joseph Leopold.
He understood what an enormous change the step his
friend had taken must entail on his mental habits. That
was how he put it, and it was easy for me to see that he
thought Joseph Leopold's writing days were over. I
thought so too, and that he had done his fair war-toll for
forty-two — two propaganda books in six months. I had
cried for three days, and I think, I hope, that this theory
of mine dictated my tears . . . and my shameful
contumacy. I could hardly bear even to help to make
arrangements, but I did write to Conrad to ask him if he
knew anything about some field-glasses that Joseph
Leopold remembered " knocking about at the Pent
Farm."

Yes, Conrad remembered them, but age, and some help
from Jackolo, had long since " resolved them into their
primitive elements." And they wouldn't have been
good enough. They were his watch-keeping glasses, just
sufficient to pick up a ship's lights at night. Joseph
Leopold would want something that would be more
efficient. Conrad's boy had left to join the Grove Park
Depot of the A.S.C., and his father had never seen him
look so happy. If anyone ever saw the portal of the
seventh heaven open on this earth it was that boy, he
said, and added that he shuddered at the recollection. In
about a fortnight young Borys found himself attached to
a heavy Howitzer, so his next letter was positively
incoherent with joy.

262 The Flurried Years

They all were — the " boys " — dash it ! Borys,
seventeen, Joseph Leopold, forty-two — both as happy
as kings.

Mr. Conrad sent me Victory, announcing that it was
doing well. Positively he didn't care a damn whether it
did or not. He had been too long " at the game" (of
letters), and was heartily sick of it. Did I remember that
phrase out of Salammbo about Matho, when she had
tortured him? " Et le malheureux marchait toujour s."
He would write till he died.

He did, and I think that Joseph Leopold, who began so
many tales and stories with him, ought to have finished
the one he left. No one else would know by instinct and
habit how he had wanted-it to end.

Conrad accepted, with the desire that he might never
be called upon to exercise it, the trust that Joseph
Leopold intended to repose in him — that of carrying
out his last wishes. He was honoured by it, though
he thought that "Violet by herself," would be eminently
fit for the charge Joseph Leopold wished to entrust
to both. And he was going soon to ask me for "a good
slice of afternoon," and hoped that I was as well as
it is possible to be when one's world is heaving under
one's feet, causing a sort of " moral sea-sickness."

Those slices of afternoon were memorable because it
showed me that the " moral sea-sickness " had produced
some such striking revirement of judgement and theory as
when the eyes of a man, under strong or physical emo-
tional stress, seem to turn in their sockets. The literary
eyes of Conrad were looking towards idealism. To make
anything of it " in our sense," his, Joseph Leopold's, and
mine — a flattering conjunction ! — he fancied that it was
nowadays necessary to fling the very last dregs of realism
overboard. Nothing " forced " would do. He admitted
the inclusions of here and there a technical phrase, than
which there is " nothing more suggestive."

The Flurried Years 263

From Joseph Leopold, a simple soldier, training at
Tenby, a veritable babe in arms, swimming with his
wrist-watch on and other childishnesses, went a letter
which pleased the older man mightily. He told me that he
was touched to see that Joseph Leopold did not discard
their common past. He admitted that these old days
may not have been very good days, as they should have
been. " But to me, my dear, they are a very precious
possession." In fact, he had nothing else that he could
call his own. Had Joseph Leopold put them aside in his
" more fortunate Present " his friend would have felt
distinctly the poorer for it.

Joseph Leopold's fortunate Present ! Route marches,
urgent drills, getting up at six, training for the chance of
being killed ! It was the war-fever, and all men of good
will, even authors, shared it. Conrad never rested till he
got a war job of his own, not unattended with danger.

And 'Enery ! The way these authors came up to
time I Henry James, gouty, dyspeptic, short-sighted,
could do nothing — but he did that magnificently ! He
had moved into a flat in Chelsea, started a brougham,
and entertained the British Army in the widest sense of
the word. Drawing-rooms interested him no longer.
Peggy, a niece, was living somewhere round about, the
daughter of his brother William, author of one of the
most widely interesting, most psychological of books, the
material of half a dozen novels buried in accounts of the
varieties of religious " dopes " — for so he seems to me to
envisage them, but most reverently. His brother,
Henry, had never talked religion ; he now talked Army,
thought Army, and died Army — quite suddenly !

No one expected it. Like little Miles, I think the great
man's heart broke because of another apparent turpitude
— because America was so slow coming in.

"He is dying, madam ! " the porter at 21 Carlyle
Mansions said to me one evening when I went there, not

264 The Flurried Years

expecting to see him, but to enquire after a slight cold
that had been announced. " A little set-back," said the
lady of next door, who came down the stairs from his
flat and asked me to go in to tea with her. There was no
need for me to ring, for she had been right into the flat and
had " seen Peggy." He was ill, indeed, but that very
morning the doctor had given them all fresh hopes. . . .
And yet, before the morning, I had lost my " trusty,
rusty Henry James."

Which of them killed the Premier British Subject —
Germany or America ? Germany murdered Americans
in the Lusitania, but America only came in after murder-
ing her own Henry James with her delays. He did not
live to see the two reconcilements, but in England there
was surely more joy when Henry James came over than
if even President Wilson himself had repented. By the
time Henry died we had got used to thinking that was
impossible, and doubtless Henry was no more optimistic
than the nation to which he now belonged. I had asked
him, using the pauses to which he had, as it were, trained
me :

" Why, Mr. James, precisely, did you do it ? "

He answered, " My dear Purple Patch, chiefly because
I wanted to be able to say We — with a capital — when I
talked about an Advance."

I suppose that, during those last few months, he said
We so hard, took the affairs of Us so much to heart, that
it gave him the stroke from which he died. Paralysed he
was, all up that side that leaves the brain comparatively
free.

Henry James could not legally belong to two nations
at once, like Joseph Leopold, but I was never allowed to
forget that We included the French. I shall never forget
his rage when I told him of how Mrs. Fisher (Adrienne
Dayrolles), who had played for him in Guy Domville,

The Flurried Years 265

had been lunching with some ladies of the English upper
classes who were doing all sorts of war work, and doing it
very nicely, too. They were bragging of " our men " at
Ypres, justly enough, but one of them, less British than
the others, had sufficient detachment to observe the angry
dismay of a Frenchwoman whose countrymen were being
quite unconsciously left out of this paean. With the
high courtesy of her race, and it is to be feared some of
its stupidity, she put in a word for Mrs. Fisher's benefit,
saying, with a note of flippant patronage, " And the
French did very well, too \"

He boiled. I boiled. We boiled together. That kind
of thing happened too often, and Henry James's sym-
pathies, if anything, were rather more with the country
that had produced Flaubert, the original seeker of
le mot juste, that now old-fashioned slogan. The war
has killed le mot juste. But the uses of his sympathy
naturally fell to the country of his adoption — " Anything
I can do, anything I can write ! " No war appeal went
unregarded ; he even allowed himself to be interviewed.
The chaste Henry ! He ceased to " chaperon " himself.
Words were put into his mouth — ineptitudes ! Greater
love hath no man than he lay down his style for his friend.
He was so willing to help that he was eager to be
comprehended of the people.

Mary Robinson asked him to write an article for the
Book of France and she would translate it. It would
appear here in English, too. He said to me, shyly :

" I want you to let me read you something I have
written. Perhaps you would be kind enough to tell me if
I am comprehensible? They tell me " — he turned his
head away — " that I am obscure. ..."

A pause. He was preparing apologies ... for the
immense compliment he was going to pay me . . .
sweetly clumsy : " You must not think that I am pre-
paring to experiment on a vile body . . . yours ... I

266 The Flurried Years

just remembered that you were one of my oldest
friends."

He read . . . standing . . . walking up and down in
the front part of the room a long way from where I sat.
But I heard. His voice, strong, resonant — the wonderful
voice that old invalid men can muster when put to it —
trembled, not from feebleness, but from emotion.
Emotion, in Henry James ! It was all perfectly clear,
and of a poignancy ! That was because he was in
love with his subject. France, la belle France . . .
intensely feminine, a bit of a cat, as I always see her.
She stood there personified. No real woman could have
resisted a real lover pleading in such a voice as that for
le don de I'amoureuse Merci. Listening, I was stimulated
to boldness — actual impertinence, it seemed to me ten
minutes afterwards. But he was not angry ; he knew
that his reading had provoked the boldness that had
borne me on the wave of enthusiasm which must earn
me my forgiveness. It was an old man's slinky triumph.
One for me, too, for twice this day I had succeeded in
making Henry shy.

I said, " Mr. James ! . . . I did not know you could be
so — passionate \" I had sought and found le mot juste.

He turned and glared a little ... a frown that was
really a smile ... he was gratified at the tremendous
effect he had produced on this woman he always persisted
in calling a frivolous mondaine. He walked towards a
bookcase at the other end of the room to give himself a
countenance . . . and time. ... He also had to find
le mot juste !

He found it. He turned on me an eye, narquois,
reflective, stork-like, a little devilish, calmly wise — the
Henry James eye, in fact — and, with a little pompous
laugh . . . the male warding off any attack that the
persevering female might possibly be contemplating
against his supreme bachelordom :

The Flurried Years 267

" Ah, madam, you must not forget that in this article
I am addressing— not a Woman, but a Nation ! "

Of course, he had gout now, like any good old English
gentleman. Sometimes when I went to see him he would
have his foot — both feet — swathed in linen bandages,
laid out helplessly on a chair in front of him — " My old
pain in possession " — very much annoyed if I dropped
my glove or something that, however near his chair, he
could not pick up for me. He stooped for things in
excess — embarrassingly — and I have known such a
contretemps cloud a whole afternoon. He would be a
little untidy, perhaps, dressing-gown unequally disposed
over night-gear, looking what he was — a thoroughly ugly
man, with eyes dull, dyspeptic and inward, flat and deep
set, like landlocked bays, gloomy, relieved at times by the
harbour-lights of humour — a stony twinkle of innocent
malice. He was all good — herzen's gut, as poor little
Elizabeth Schultz used to say of the editor.

But, well or ill, it was understood that we talked in
these days of war and nothing but war. There was to be
no resumption of the Society gossip in which he used to
delight. It was what one had gathered about Zeppelin
defences while staying at an anti-aircraft station at
Shingle Street, on the east coast, or whether
one thought the recruiting good at Cardiff or at
Redcar, where one would have lived for a month
or two. Were the streets nicely full of khaki ?
Had I really seen a ten-shilling piece in that remote
corner of Wales ? Several ? And what did the many men
I must have met tell me about their respective experiences,
and could I bring Mr. Stacke, the wounded officer of my
acquaintance to see him who, after the battle of the
Marne, riding into Paris, had made a detour to see the
Chateau de Pierrefonds ? And he would wear him next
his heart, for he loved to think of an officer as a Bayard

268 The Flurried Years

who had not altogether lost his love of the arts. Rupert
Brooke, a little wounded but able to come to lunch, he
cherished like a son. I remember seeing his hand laid
on the knee of the young soldier-poet like a benediction.
We would drive him home after lunch in the carriage.
He must be petted . . . must not walk, even if he
could. . . .

He would never speak of Rupert Brooke after he had
died.

He sometimes, but not often, spoke to me of Conrad
who had sent his son and had so far got him safe, but
never knew whether he was to be allowed to keep him —
until the end.

Conrad got very low in hope towards the end. We were
all of us, gentle and simple, writers and readers, under the
flail, winnowed out to the death. Conrad, a grincheur,
seemed more beaten than the rest.

These were the little old bitter speeches that fear and
waiting forced from him :

" Oui, mon cher. . . . Our world of fifteen years ago
is going to pieces, and what will come in its place God
knows, but, I imagine, doesn't care. . . .

" Still, what I have said was the only immortal line in
our Romance : ' Excellency, a few goats survive. . . .'

" Esoteric, sublime, profound, and comic, it still
survives ! "

And, of the far-flung battle-front of the English
Review, some survive and Some Do Not. Conrad has
gone; James and Hudson went soon after the peace.
The last of those two great veterans, on his window-sill in
Kilburn, had fed the birds that came to his hand from the
heavy masking plane-trees that gave them shelter, out of
his very substance, all through the war . . . but it was
not the weakening of his rations that killed him. It was

WILLIAM HENRY HUDSON

[p. s«a

The Flurried Years 269

age. He was almost old enough to live on air. I think he
very nearly did, if one listened to his housekeeper and
heard what a very little food supported that fine, thin,
shooting flame of energy. It must have been on
air and the store of the mind-energy that he walked, that
he boarded 'buses in motion, that he climbed the heights
of Campden Hill to drink tea with me and the William
Rothensteins and "Wyn " Hooper, who had known his
wife and who was his kind and thoughtful executor. If
he dined with me, he gaily and deliberately eked out a
potato or so as against our cutlet or slice off the joint.
Once he called at six and took me to a cinema. That
night neither of us had any dinner. He did not seem to
miss it. But he liked afternoon tea and cake best, and
adored meeting people, whispering to me before they
came that he could not stand it.

" Dear Mr. Ewart, — Will you come to-morrow to
tea to meet the most charming man in the world ?
Not a party. He is too old and ill, but I know you will
be gentle."

Poor Wilfred Ewart, whom Mr. Hudson particularly
wanted to meet, died a few months afterwards in Mexico.
He came, and he was gentle, for he, too, could not be
otherwise. The war had maimed him and made him shy ;
he had the mine effaree of a faun. I remember the spare,
angular young soldier sitting, his long neck like a pillar
hardly moving in its still, high collar, his ear ragged,
torn by a shot, standing away slightly from his cheek,
beside the graceful, perfect old man of unknown age —
except that his first communications about the birds he
had seen at and around Buenos Ayres appears in the
Athenceum round about 1870.

Yes, though I had known him since I was a child, and
he was grey then, I supposed him not more than seventy

270 The Flurried Years

at the very most, delicate and catch-coldy because of his
foreign birth. I always hastened to fence off any acci-
dental revelation of its date, for who knows that he did
not take an elfish pleasure in our ignorance of his secret.
I was careful of him because I knew that he had a weak
heart, and had recommended the young man to be
soothing lest, in his ardour, he wearied or startled the
dynamo that maintained the delicate spirit in its gracile
sheath of flesh. Huddie was deceptive in that he
was so anxious not to give trouble and so proud of this
unknown weight of years gallantly and unobtrusively
borne.

He would enter the room, full of people or otherwise,
with the wearied grace of a D'Orsay, his small head
slightly bowed, as if in deprecation of his tallness. He
would bestow his long legs unobtrusively on a small gilt
chair, or, if we were alone, on a causeuse, reclining where
other men would have lolled. I would note the fine line
from shoulder to knee and the steel-like limbs in their
well-made clothes, for he cared for his appearance —
went to a good tailor and chose his colours carefully.
If I offered him a cushion, ten to one he would refuse it,
but latterly, of his own motion, he would stretch himself
out on the sofa and " put up his feet " like a lady.

In the autumn we would desert the Pre-Raphaelite
drawing-room and go for greater warmth and comfort to
the Vorticist study, where all the comfortable saddlebag
chairs were. All styles, all rooms, all houses even, that
were not a " lodge of boughs," were alike to him. He had
no " taste " — so called. We sat together on that welcome
anomaly, the extra large Chesterfield sofa that came from
my great-grandfather's rectory in Durham, and, with
our backs turned — it was his only sign of misliking — to
the cubes and fireworks, and towards the " Long Girl" of
Albert Rutherston, which he rather liked, he would
tell me in that tenuous, wistful voice of his, which now I

The Flurried Years 271

know to have been the sign of age, of cats and birds, poets
and publishers, nuns and flappers (" maidens " or
" maidies " he would call them when they lived in the
country ! ) . He would declare pettishly that, since it had
been announced that he was writing a book on animals, he
was overwhelmed with letters from people about their so
talented pets. He discussed his collected edition
and the tiresome ways of rival publishers. He was
proud of having prevented a beautiful young Catholic
nurse in Cornwall from taking the vows, and
pleased, too, that the nuns — because of his
charm, I very well suppose, had forgiven him.

He spoke very plainly to me about this girl's figure and
her obvious and startling aptness for motherhood. I
think Mr. Epstein must have second sight, for the
author's description of this lady's contours tallied with
the sculptor's presentment of the Spirit of Nature —
whom the public still persist in caUing Rima — which I went
on a summer's day lately to the Park to see unveiled.
I know that Rima, in Green Mansions, was very much
under six feet, with a voice too large for her body. Cela
fait I'eloge of Emily Hudson's husband, for she did sing
divinely, and she was so short that a high footstool was
always placed in front of her, and her hands were large,
ugly, and ill-kept. Mr. Epstein has builded better than he
knows.

Like many wilfully shy and withdrawn persons, he did
not want for knowledge of the world, and once, when we
watched a cinema reproduction of the orgiastic midnight
life of New York, he was more up to the cynical implica-
tions of it all than I was. He did not mince words or
fight shy of medical terms or disdain to go into the
pros and cons of a recent ugly case with an absence of
circumlocution and a directness of expression that seemed
to disinfect them. As for the sexual aberrations of the
classical world, I once asked him to tell me about the

272 The Flurried Years

nightingale whose song I had heard in his own downland
country, and realised only the pity and terror, none of the
fabled beauty, of the cry. He told me very slowly,
without emphasis — and it took a long time — a shocking,
as it were police-court, story of savage lust and cruelty.
I have never listened to the nightingale since ; but when
next comes to my ears the heart-rending wail that crept
along the hedges at Marten I shall see the place of the
slaying of Itylus, and hear, not the love-plaint, but the
voice of the child's blood crying woe against the woman
who, for the sake of revenge, slays joy — as women do.

As the winter drew on and his necessary flight to the
Cornish Riviera loomed before him, he spoke to me of
death and its imminence timidly, faintly, allusively, as
I imagine primitive people and peasants may, fearful
lest they who hold the shears may hear . . . take notice,
perhaps, that such a one is overdue in the shades. . . .
And one afternoon in his own house, the dark of an
October day made darker by the dolorous planes, dusty
with the summer's drift of the streets they mercifully
masked, he sat beside me on the tattered, leather-covered
sofa, under the tall book-case, bowed a little, like some
sad soul sitting on the Stygian brink, " waiting for
waftage," and held out to me his soft, warm, life-giving
hand, so little suggestive of Death of which, for once, he
spoke freely.

That day the King of Shadows was in the wide,
cavernous room ... a new candour had come into
being . . . fostered perhaps by some egotistic complaint
of my own. He announced defiantly, as he had announced
many a time before, that he was engaged in tearing up
manuscripts, burning naturalist's notes, commandeering
his own letters from friends, "so as to leave not a
scrap. ..." His voice rose ; he was asserting his right
and will to destroy as he was to be destroyed. One of
his scientific friends had put before him a ruthless theory

The Flurried Years 273

of the non-survival of consciousness after death which I
knew disturbed and convinced him. Since, so his friend
told him, all ideas and associations are recorded on minute
filaments of the brain substance, and since these mortal
filaments decay, he could not believe that the register
they hold, which is, in effect, consciousness, can survive.
As well expect the manuscripts of the Four Courts to
have remained after the place was burned down !

He sat with his head upon his hands ; the sting of death
was so sharp that no futile, cliche-like consolation could
modify its poignancy. I despaired, even as he did, but I
tried to instil the comfort of which I indeed could not
avail myself.

" Don't talk to me. / know. / know. You are
young. ..." I realised then that he must really be old
to talk like that. " I am looking straight at death —
down a funnel — that narrows — the end of it is closed.
And I have nothing to do but die. ..." The languid
legs crossed and uncrossed.

" I cannot, at my age, forget for a single moment.
And I don't want to ! " He said that quite querulously,
and then sat up and smiled, as if to beg forgiveness for
showing temper with me — and Death. He resumed, in a
voice low, soft, changed from the voice of his rage, " The
time will come ... I shall not see the grass and the
things moving up and down in it. And when you
talk of being unhappy ! . . ."

I asked him piteously if he was really sure that all was
lost when we were dead, and he bade me, gently, read
something he had written in his last book which he had
sent me, and guessed that I had not read — The Return of
the Chiff-Chaff. All he thought about Death was there ;
it was the nearest he could get to telling me what he felt.
I had forgotten it ... I floundered a little, but he did
not notice. He was, for the moment, beyond literary
politenesses ; an animal trapped, with knowledge of its

Sy

274 The Flurried Years

doom ; a child afraid of the oncoming dark ; a grown
man simply dreading " the night when no man can work."

The distress of eld was communicated to me, although
I was younger. We sat still. The leaves of the plane-
trees outside rustled, and the pigeons, near their hour of
feeding from his hand, cooed sweetly. The handsome
Scotch housekeeper like a Rossetti, with her wistful,
primmed, yet curved and sensuous mouth, who was all
the woman about the house for this lonely man and a
couple of old maids in the flats above and below, came
in and cleared away some of the rusty old keepsake
albums, and the new smart gilt volumes that came out of
America, from the centre table, and, shoving others on one
side, spread a cloth worked in coloured crewels and set a
tray on that to nestle uncomfortably among the literary
wrack. " Well, come to tea," he said wearily, and he
moved to the table, and I poured out the tea, which, I
believe, he would rather have done, and we both ate
large buns whose savage currantiness I did not appreciate
but made a note to offer him the like next time he came
to me instead of flimsy bread and butter, for tea was his
last meal ; and when we had eaten we went into a sort
of a little box of a pantry to get the maize and lay it on
the projecting tray on the sill which he had fashioned
to support the food and the unwieldy grey birds that
knew him, though, with me there, they would not come,
but sat aloof and looked at us.

I liked best to get him to come to me, forth of the
dreary domain where he stayed out of pride and loyalty
to " Rima," the Voice in the Tree, who had lived there
with him till hideous illness forced her from his side six
years ago — the lady of Green Mansions. I had never
seen her, but I had heard of her always as a tiny being
heavy for her height, possessed of golden hair and a
mighty voice, who, long since she had charmed him, had
grown sullen and cantankerous ; made pettish demands

The Flurried Years 275

on his time and his patience, and kept his friends away
from the house. Indeed, he once told me in a letter, depre-
cating my too sentimental view of the relations of man
and woman, that he had not married his wife for love
but for companionship. " He that loveth his life shall
lose it." She lived away, and he was glad of it.

I have never found in all my friend's writings a line
that leads me to suppose that he ever entertained that
exclusive emotion, that desperately passionate interest,
with which modern men may regard modern women —
modern love, which is, after all, an invention of the
Minnesingers ratified by the Courts of Countesses of
Champagne when a knight's devotion was his constant
moral wear, like his lady's sleeve on his heaulme. He
spoke of a woman's " passion " to me once, but it was
only a spasm of humanitarianism evoked in the beautiful
Dorothy Grey by the sight of an act of stupid cruelty.
She noticed an ugly tramp picking a bird out of a hedge
and putting it into his pocket. She rose from her seat.
" Give that to me ! " she said, and the hedge-thief,
daunted by her splendid and " passionate " gesture
surrendered his prey and the lady lay in " Huddie's '
heart for ever.

Once, surely — normally, simply, like the birds and
beasts in their springtime — he sought a mate, and, even
then, it was a spiritual one, that Voice in a tree. That
was his romance, and the extinguishing of it and the
Voice together his tragedy!

Before I went down to the country last August I gave
him my address, saying that, if I did not hear from him
soon — just a line — I should be anxious, and I am afraid
that offended him a little and prevented him from writing.
Aware of his wild susceptibility on the score of being
looked after, I did not worry much, as I was coming home
soon.

276 The Flurried Years

On the Friday morning I had come downstairs, faint
with want of sleep, into the large, light library and
glanced at The Times, telling my host that, in the watches
of the night, I had had a presentiment that on opening
the paper, I should see the announcement of my friend's
death — as, of course, I should some day, for he was old —
and in very large letters, for he was a great man.

The morning after that I awoke refreshed after sleeping
well, and, after breakfast, opened The Times and read of
the death of Dame Genevieve Ward, and lingered over the
details of her life-history while, all the time, in the
adjacent column, was the announcement I had dreaded
to see. Only when I had done one column did the headline
of the next strike me, and I saw that a greater than she
had gone. He had died while I watched, sleepless, the
night before. I went to one of the tall windows and
looked out on the placid Kentish scene, and made up my
mind to look on his face once more and walk after him
to the grave, wherever it was they chose to lay him. And
all the rest of the day I was telephoning to find out where
and when that was to take place. Between waiting for
trunk calls and return telegrams I mused on those hours
spent with him, and especially the last time that one
never knows to be the last, or one would never have the
heart to part.

We had been lunching at Whiteley's together, under
the dome. He liked a table there — the pearly glass roof,
that scintillated with flakes of light, implied sky, and the
opposite of his home, with its black, smoke-stained
ceiling, the tattered wallpaper, and picture-frames with
all their gilding gone. We had a very bad luncheon
which he enjoyed — spinach and cheese and coffee —
and we talked languidly of Wagner. There was a shadow
under the gleaming dome. He was dull and far away.

He put me into a 'bus. As we crossed the road, an
access of the protective instinct came over me, which I

The Flurried Years 277

showed and he lightly resented. While we waited for the
'bus he was telling me that he had just bought a coat-dress
for a girl, and it had cost £2 10s. I fancy that was for
the landlady's little daughter at Penzance. Then the
'bus drew up, and I got in and watched him, still nervous,
out of the window between the people's heads, as he
turned away and walked in the direction of Kilburn.
He was agile and upright ; only the other day Alice told
me that, after lunch, her girls walked with him to the
bottom of Sheffield Terrace, and, to go home, he had
boarded No. 31 while it was in motion.

I got into London at midnight on Sunday, and, early
next morning, I boarded No. 31. (How our little life is
rounded with these 'buses !) I got down at Westbourne
Park Station, turned some corners, and came to a row of
gaunt and decaying stuccoed and Victorian houses,
standing back, with what they call a garden, from a
straw- and paper-bestrewn street. This was where he
and his wife had lived in the tall house at the corner of
another dreadful street bisecting it.

" Huddie " was his own landlord ; I had been told that
he owned the whole row, but my impression is that only
one house was his, which he had converted into three
flats and basement for a housekeeper. For himself, he
had retained the first floor ; his tenants, he told me, were
preferably ladies.

I looked in vain for the usual effect of white eyelids
cast down, but not until I was quite near did I become
aware that the usual sign of respect had been paid him,
and that all the windows were blanks of dirty Union,
dun-coloured like the walls. The door was open. The
Scotch housekeeper with the Rossetti face was talking to
" Ground Floor," a sad-faced old maid. " I was expecting
you," she said. The old lady bundled away. My hands
were full of sprigs of Banksia roses, which I had wrenched
from the bush at my own door because he had admired

278 The Flurried Years

it so often, standing there by the bell he had just rung,
looking like a traveller from a distance, with a coat upon
his arm, especially when it was warm weather. I had
scratched my hand. I had been in such a hurry to get
there before they fastened down the lid of the coffin, so as
to look my last upon the most beautiful human being my
eyes have ever rested upon.

His beauty — I use the word in the sense of that
dominating, all-over excellence which may characterise
all men and women so favoured of the gods — was implicit
in the whole of his being. It was not determined to the
head or face ; to my mind his face was too small, too
beak-like, too much refined to a point. If, as we have
it, all men suggest likeness to some animal, one might
figure him some bird pressing forward against a gale ;
his profile and his hair, even, had a wind-blown, back-
ward sweep. It was not an " open " face, the gaze of it
was, on the whole, too shrewd, too wilful and withdrawn.
The eyes were bright and dark, the regard narrowed con-
tinually in a sort of wild, astute vigilance. The eyes had
grown less bright, less vigilant, and the voice, always quiet
and measured, in these last months thin and faint, some-
times querulous, as of a prophet ancient and disregarded,
like Burne- Jones's Merlin in the hawthorn brake. . . .

The housekeeper said No ! he was screwed down
already, and was to be " took ' ' by road to-morrow at nine to
Broadwater Cemetery, where his wife was buried. There
was no need to go up, so we stood on the rough, hairy
mat, interrupted by tradesmen, peered at by the dis-
gracious old tenants of his choice who made a business of
crossing and recrossing the dull hall, made gay by my
flaring red roses. Behind us, at the top of the kitchen
stairs gaping black, little red-cheeked Rossetti children
in cleanish pinafores poked their heads up and asked their
mother what they should do about this and that. . . .

The Flurried Years 279

He had been unwell since Monday, with the indiges-
tion high up. He kept touching his chest, saying that he
could not sleep because of the oppression. ... He was
sure that, if he could only get some sleep, he would be all
right again, and he determined to eat nothing solid. She
got a doctor in who had agreed with him, so he had just
Bovril and some weak tea. I thought, and said, that
perhaps the doctor meant made beef-tea and nourishing
cocoa. " Yes," said the housekeeper, " I expect the
doctor did, but he would not have things made on
purpose for him, nor yet a nurse." He was very fond of
tea, and used to make it in the little pantry for himself
as early as five in the morning when he had not slept,
and at all sorts of queer hours.

These independent arrangements, these matutinal
rovings, constituted, I think, one at least of the reasons
why he would not come and stop with me, as I pressed
him to do when he complained that his bones ached so
that he could not sleep, having confidence in my own
soft mattresses. But he said gently, " My dear, I don't
want to come and die in your house ! " The image
evoked was like a sudden jab at one's heart, and made
one answer brusquely, " I shouldn't mind." Once,
when his need was very sore — the housekeeper was
going away for a fortnight's much-needed holiday — he
did promise as he saw me to the corner. He was to
come and stay the very next night. I shouted from
the step of No. 31 to him, standing bareheaded among
the paper strewings and detritus of suburban life wWch
banked the gutter : " Now mind, I expect you ! " But
I felt he would never come.

The indigestion couldn't be stirred ; the oppression
continued, and he lay there sleepless, alone. The house-
keeper went up as often as she could- He spoke, she
said, often of Alice and of me, admitting it was a bad
job we were both away and couldn't come and talk to

280 The Flurried Years

him, but he would not have us sent for — " No, no ! "
in his weak, threadlike voice. On Thursday morning
his best friend came to him, the man who had given him
to us all for ten years longer, making him take digitalis
for his weak heart, but had not dared to bring in a nurse
lest he should kill his dear by over-exciting him ; but
he insisted on bringing in a specialist. The prescription
of that gentleman was not to hand till midnight — "and
then we had to go for it all the way to Whiteley's ! "
Whiteley's is not very far. Oh, that I had been there
to use my legs in his service !

At midnight she left him, charging him on no account
to get up, for she would look in herself at five o'clock
and make his tea. She did so. It was dawn when she
saw him again, lying awake but uncomplaining, rather
more cheerful. He said that he felt drowsy, and, after
he had had his tea, he settled himself confidently to go to
sleep. She thought him a bit dazed and queerish, but
that was partly because, before she left the room again,
he shook hands with her, saying, " Good-bye ! " instead
of " Good-night ! " But, as she afterwards reflected,
the night was by that time well over, and he might have
thought of that. . . .

At eight she sent the little Rossetti girl up to his room
to call him, who returned saying that he was asleep.
So she let him "lie " a little longer — about half an hour
— and then sent the child again, who returned with the
M.me answer, adding that she had touched the gentle-
man and he did not wake. Then the sweet woman,
full oS fears, hurried upstairs, and found him lying on
his side . mercifully ; for then, she said, the chance was
he would lot have had ill dreams. He was quite warm
— not long dead. He did not get cold till midday, she
said but was still warm in the small of his back. . . .
And his face was beautiful . . . beautiful . . . but a few
hours later so altered that she could not bear to look at it.

The Flurried Years 281

I said that I must go up. There was no chance of
seeing him. I knew the lid was screwed down ; but I
believe, confused, obfuscated by sudden grief, I thought
I should see him, for the first thing I did on going into
the room was to look at the wide bed on which the sheet
was untidily pulled up, expecting to see the outline of
a form beneath it. And I said, " But where is he ? "
like Mary Magdalene, and she pointed to the coffin,
which I had overlooked, drawn up alongside of the bed
like a sort of annexe. It was of light and smooth yellow
wood, glistening with brass clamps and drop-handles.
There were some white flowers near the name-plate,
and I laid my roses beside them ; it seemed to me now
silly and useless, but I had brought them for that pur-
pose. Then I stood and stared all round that long, ugly
room into which he had once brought me to show the
Chinese toilet service he wanted me to have — afterwards.
It was so large and unwieldy that he only used the soap
dish and toothbrush tray of one set, and he had three.
The spare ewers and basins were in the drawing-room
on top of a high Chippendale bookcase, and I was
appalled to see him stand, both hands raised, on the
tippy back of the sofa in front of it to reach them down,
for I knew he had a heart. The jugs, with long, narrow
necks like vases, embossed with birds and flowers in
green and red and yellow, were heavy. I didn't know
what ware, nor did he. He had said he wanted to sell
two sets out of the three, and I told him I would like
to buy one — for ten pounds say? He had forgotten
what he had said about giving it me. He hesitated,
saying, " I don't know the value . . . and ... it might
be more than ten pounds ? " So the bargain lapsed.

At the foot of the bed was a table covered with green
baize and a writing-pad, with a pen lying near it, filled
up to half-way down. Had he got out of bed to write
in the night ? We wondered. . . . Near the foot of

282 The Flurried Years

the bed was an empty saucer. He had been feeding
the cat, I suppose. . . .

We stood, the woman who had spoken with him last
and I, talking out loud. " How can we?" I said, and,
with a despairing gesture, she replied, " It doesn't
matter." She was weeping, but, although she spoke
of him with regard, it was not the familiar fondness that
good, kind masters evoke in persons of her class. I
imagine that her sentimentality was rebutted by her
simplicity, his polite aloofness which was the meed of
us all. He must have seemed to her " so different from
most gentlemen she had done for," and, of course, she
had not the intercourse with him through his writings
which we had.

She spoke of his wife, quite six years away from this
house, and, indeed, it was time she went ! Her nerves
were awful. Her ways — her hands — well ! The Rossetti
mouth stiffened in retrospective disgust. Her legs were
so short that she always had to have a footstool. I knew
that well enough. She wore ringlets. She did not like
him away, and he never left her unless there was some-
one chartered to sit with her. I remember his visits
to our house in those days, and how, at the stroke of
six, Huddie would put down his cup or whatever he was
holding and bolt back to her. I never dared offer to
call ; I was told that she would have been rude to me ;
and now, judging from this nice creature's unconsidered
utterances, I realised that was very likely. He was
" good with her " — what does not that phrase mean ?
— but, of course, it gave him nerves, too. . . .

Was he ever in danger of forgetting that this dwarfish,
exacting creature had been, sometime, the songstress who
sat in her bower in the tree-tops and charmed the young
huntsman's soul out of his body with her singing ? I
do not think so. He drank his cups, and asked not
that they should pass from him.

The Flurried Years 283

There was a dull crimson stain on the side of the
covering sheet next the coffin. She saw my eyes fixed
on it, and started talking of ugly things pertaining to
the mortal body which lets us down, betrays us so in
our hour of helplessness, forcing us to relinquish our care-
fully retained elegancies and decencies . . . she was
wilhng to gratify the taste we all share for the macabre.
But I would not let her do so, for the sake of love and
remembrance and the cult of the vision I meant to retain.
The dreadful antithesis was less plain to her than me.
That this pale Exquisite, whose mortal dross should
surely have been transmuted quickly into the pale dews
of spirit — that this Incorruptible must first don
Corruption and, in making his toilet for the grave, bleed
red blood like a soldier on the battlefield ! I thought
that I, and how much more he, would have preferred
to shield the mortal lapse in some dark, cold cave, or,
lying in state on a mountain peak, have the eagles pick
his brains as white as those of a harmless sheep on
Helvellyn. For such a one to perish in the wrack of a
" mouldering lodge " in Kilburn ! . . .

It was his own choice, yet, from that moment, every-
where, the suggestion of decay. In the passage, where
the oilcloth had " perished " in parti-coloured scabs ;
in the drawing-room, where, from the blotched and
bleared red sofas and bergeres, the leather was peeling
off, hanging in pendent flaps like the disgusting wattles
round the neck of a vulture. Not here ! Oh, not
here ! Better a shepherd's hut in Marten or on Yarm-
bury Camp, near Wylye, failing a peak in the Andes.

" Victoria, August 22nd, 11 o'clock."

" Change at Brighton ! Front part of the train."
There were not more than five or six people walking up
and down the platform whom I singled out as interested
in this direction — two old men, full of years and dignity,

284 The Flurried Years

one of the type of the foxy statesmen of the Elizabethan
age, the other eager, yet tired-looking ; another, the
chief executor who had made all the arrangements,
carrying a carton of flowers, rallying us all, seeking to
cover his grief with an attempt at Mark Tapleyism for
which we were all of us, perhaps, obliged to him. There
was a distinguished literary critic and a literary doctor
risen very obviously from a sick-bed to follow his life-
long friend on this last lap. Presently Alice touched
me on the shoulder, and we, the only two women in
the convoy, stayed with each other all the time. At
South Kensington I had missed a train to get out and buy
a pocket-handkerchief, though resolved not to " break
down." To the same end Alice had brought none at
all.

The country flashed by us. We duly changed at
Brighton and went on to Worthing. From the windows
of the train, as we crossed the Arun, I saw the reaches
of sunburned, shining sand, the tips of the masts of
ships, and inlet bays of sea between the scattered chalets
of Shoreham. There flowed in to us the smell of the
sea, of tar, and other tokens of man's daily occupation,
repugnant enough to mourners who are absenting them-
selves from their own full lives awhile that they may
solemnly accompany a fallen comrade part of the way
to the shades.

At Worthing we had an hour to wait before the carriages
that were to take us to the cemetery would draw up
outside the station, so we sat down, all of us, at a marble-
topped table in the refreshment room and fed like a
horse that unconcernedly crops the grass by the side of
a dead fellow, but shamefacedly, being human. / think
it was more what he would have wished. He was too
real for sentiment.

The publishers began to discuss the literary reputa-
tion of their late client and the proposed Collected

The Flurried Years 285

Edition. I was glad they had the grace to leave money
out of the discussion. The red-cheeked, white-bearded
one intimated politely that this reputation had been
all owing to a confrere, present, who disclaimed the
honour, and gave it away to a third, absent. Alice was
disgusted ; but to me, for whom the Work was the Life,
this conversation was not so much out of place. Often
and often Mr. Hudson and I had discussed this Collected
Edition ; the claims, pegged out, of different publishers
were the plague of his life. In the same breath he would
say that he wanted no memoirs written, no serving up
of note-books a la Butler. . . . There was talk now of a
forgotten novel, published in his youth, of which I had
never heard him speak. It was not up to the level, of
Green Mansions, but had " very fine passages. ..."
Someone said he " would not have wished it. . . ."

But have not the generations to come a right to the
royal crumbs from our life's table, and must posterity
be deprived of these portions of performance not equal
to the masterpieces of a great man, but holding " fine
passages " ? And shall the amiable whim, praiseworthy
in itself, of a modest genius be set against the delight
of future generations ?

The carriage stopped against some iron railings, in
front of a stone gate-house through whose archway we
got a glimpse of a sunlit, flower-bedight prairie. On
the platform of sullen macadam a white-banded, black-
gloved clergyman was standing beside the box that was
raised on a hand-cart. Borne by grunting bearers, it
followed us into the tiny chapel, where, for half an hour,
we listened to St. Paul's puzzling pronouncements
delivered in tones that suggested the reader's disclaimer
of any possible interpretation. When we came out it
appeared to be a question of who was to walk first after
the coffin. A short lady, in dull, complete black, was

286 The Flurried Years

mentioning with tearful urgency her name and status.
For six years she had " been with " the wife of the
deceased, and therefore desired to walk first. . . . But
the chief mourner of us all, walking alone and quickly
with his bunch of heather, was long ahead of us — meant
to be. Alice and I passed down the path bordered by
headstones, while the insistent lady in black walked
alone behind.

I felt her mute, inward clamour in my back and with
Alice's permission, invited her to walk between us. This
earned us a sad and backward glance from Mr. Hudson's
friend, for she now talked loudly about her late patient
She had often seen the husband — oh, yes, he used to come
down to Worthing sometimes and push his wife about
along the front in a bath-chair. She regretted that he
had not been down once since her funeral, so had not
seen how the daisies were growing on the double grave
with the headstone equally divided between. He had
purchased the plot of ground, promising to lie beside her
and put his name under hers. " She was always ill, and
couldn't even see to read when I came to her. . . . Over
eighteen months of it ! . . . She said many a time, ' I am
so glad I got a lady to look after me ! ' " . . . and so on
and so on. Behind us was the Rossetti housekeeper,
silent enough, her red mouth pinched with weeping and
her young husband bearing a sheaf of flowers in tissue
paper.

The grave was close to an ash-tree, whose coarse,
tough roots, truncated by the digger's spade, stuck out
like a man's six days' beard from the loamy walls of the
grave, like yellow panels.

The sun shone keen, the wind rustled in the ash-keys.
The box was lowered into the hole with bands coloured
like the rejected soil heaped half-way up the trunk of
the tree. The feet of the men pashed the pink and white
daisies on the other neat plot. Well, they would spring

The Flurried Years 287

again ! The young clergyman read the remainder of
the service from his prayer-book, propped before him,
his soft hat used as a lectern. Taken so, it was not very
moving, and no one broke down. He said " Earth to
earth " so quickly that most of us lost the phrase of
phrases. It was as well for our self-control. His
assistant did not miss his cue, but, picking from the handy
heap of soil behind him the necessary grains of earth,
threw them. They did not rattle, being clayey, and,
when he had performed his task, he dusted his palms
together with a gesture of disgust, as a white-handed,
amateur gardener might have done.

The woman who had " been with " the dead man's
wife shouted :

" Now she's happy ! At last ! She's got him to herself ! "

Afterwards, the kind executor showed me how to look
on it all a la Hudson. " Yes, poor thing ! " he said. " It
was her hour. Her one chance in her dull life of expres-
sing herself — of being before the public. He wouldn't
have stopped her ! "

No one else said anything. No one cried, but one
mourner who, after throwing his sprigs of heather down
and giving us some to throw too, walked away, stumbling
over the graves, his bowed head shaking with sobs. The
vicar, after picking me out absently to shake hands with,
departed, and the local reporters pattered about,
scrutinising names on the wreaths and asking questions
of anyone who would answer. Some of the mourners,
informed that the grave of Richard Jeffries, another
great earth-lover, was only five minutes' walk away, went
to look at it. A few of us stood there, hesitating, not
liking to leave him. . . .

Mourners, left standing upright beside a fallen comrade,
are apt to make elision of those days before the burying,
when their beloved has lain prone and already solitary

288 The Flurried Years

in a darkened room under a drawn sheet. We insist on
thinking of him as we last saw him, erect under a roof
that is waterproof, with a fire to keep him warm; or,
sturdy, in the street, holding an umbrella, perhaps, to
shield him from the rain. We may have been "sitting"
with him to ^prevent him feeling solitary, but now :

... in the colde Grave,
Alone, withouten any company,

we leave him. We are of our nature, ruthless — of
our civilisation, grown utilitarian ; we have the heart —
because of a certain chemical change, gradual, hardly
to be detected at the beginning, except by experts — to
consign this beloved brother of ours who has, peradven-
ture, only just left our table, our fireside, to lie in a cold
ditch six feet long by three feet wide or so, to spend his
first night, perhaps, alone under the stars or the rain.

In his own words — and capitals— set down in the little
article of faith — of which he spoke to me, William Henry
Hudson had suffered " The Monstrous Betrayal." The
Power he worshipped but did not trust had destroyed
him, willy-nilly. And I must return home, and quietly,
within doors, warm and cherished, read again with
reverence The Return of the Chiff-Chaff, that trivial
incident wherein his philosophy is embodied, and learn
from him the grudging but undistinguishing submission
of all natural things to natural law that he practised who
preached.

THE END

1751

I AN

i*3 ^